That U.S. prosecutors didn’t find ballot-stuffing in Detroit and Atlanta says nothing about whether there were systemic violations of election law and illegal voting in 2020. //

But what Barr didn’t investigate—and indeed shouldn’t have investigated—were the many violations of state election law highlighted by Trump’s legal team in their lawsuits challenging the election results. For instance, in Georgia, the state election code requires residents to “vote in the county in which they reside, unless they changed their residence within 30 days of the election” and “outside of the 30-day grace period, if people vote in a county in which they no longer reside, ‘their vote in that county would be illegal.’”

Trump’s legal team obtained solid evidence that as many as 30,000 Georgia residents voted illegally in their prior county in 2020. Trump never had his day in court on this challenge, though, which theoretically could have resulted in Georgia’s election results tossed. //

That’s not the business of the attorney general, however, so those Republicans seeing Barr as derelict misunderstand his role. Likewise, those Democrats championing Barr’s words, believing it establishes a coup attempt by Trump, ignore that his testimony focused solely on election fraud. //

While Barr could testify concerning the cases of voter fraud the Department of Justice investigated, in the aftermath of the November 2020 election the former attorney general did not scrutinize, nor should he have, violations of state election law or potential violations of the Equal Protection Clause caused by the states’ disparate standards applied during the election.