Bill Barr, Trump Henchman, Is Sending Armed Agents to Ballot-Counting Locations

By now you’ve likely heard that Donald Trump’s supporters have been playing out a real-life Veep episode wherein they’re shouting “stop the count!” in states where the president is ahead and “count the vote!” where he is behind. They of course got this asinine, entirely undemocratic idea from their leader, who has spent the last several days alternately tweeting things like this:

…and at other times, things like this:

And while Team Trump doesn’t actually get to decide if all the ballots should be counted—they will be, unless we suddenly became Belarus overnight and are just holding sham elections—it obviously believes intimidation will help its cause, which got a boost yesterday from none other than the U.S. Department of Justice. Per the New York Times:

The Justice Department told federal prosecutors in an email early on Wednesday that the law allowed them to send armed federal officers to ballot-counting locations around the country to investigate potential voter fraud, according to three people who described the message. The email created the specter of the federal government intimidating local election officials or otherwise intervening in vote tallying amid calls by President Trump to end the tabulating in states where he was trailing in the presidential race, former officials said.

The law prohibits armed federal agents from standing outside the polls on Election Day, but apparently Bill Barr, consummate Trump lackey, believes that means they’re perfectly acceptable any time after Election Day. The statute “does not prevent armed federal law enforcement persons from responding to, investigate, or prevent federal crimes at closed polling places or at other locations where votes are being counted,” DOJ official Richard P. Donoghue told prosecutors in an email sent at 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

Trump, of course, has spent months baselessly claiming evidence of fraud, as has Barr, who said in September that one man filled out 1,700 ballots himself, which of course wasn’t true at all.