The director of electoral crimes of the United States Department of Justice, Richard Pilger, resigned this Monday night after the order of the attorney general, William Barr, to investigate the alleged fraud in the presidential elections, reported EFE.
"Having familiarized myself with the new rule and its ramifications (…) I regretfully must resign my position as director of the Election Crimes Division," Pilger announced in an internal communication leaked to US media.
Pilger also lamented that Barr's order "repeals a 40-year-old rule of non-interference (federal) in election fraud investigations during the period before the election is certified."
This resignation comes after Barr criticized the role of Pilger's division on Monday and instructed all Justice Department prosecutors to investigate alleged irregularities in the past presidential elections before the results are final.
"I authorize you to investigate substantial allegations of voting or vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of the election in your jurisdictions in certain cases, as I have already done in specific instances," Barr said in a memo to his prosecutors.
"Such investigations and reviews may be conducted if there are clear and apparently credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially affect the outcome of a federal election in a particular state," he added.
The president's attorney general (Minister of Justice), Donald Trump, also instructed his prosecutors to discard complaints of cases that, if true, would not affect the final result, since these can be resumed once the results are certified.
In the memo, Barr expressed concern about the existing protocols in the Department for such an investigation, which specifically state that they should not be activated until the results are official.
Barr called these protocols, which Pilger alluded to in his resignation and which aim to have states, rather than the federal government, decide elections, "passive and time-consuming," and said they "may lead to situations where election misconduct cannot realistically be rectified."
With this order, Barr put federal prosecutors at the service of Trump's strategy, who has not recognized his defeat in last week's elections against the president-elect, Joe Biden, and denounces without evidence a large electoral fraud.
The campaign of the outgoing president and the Republican Party have filed more than a dozen lawsuits - some already withdrawn - in various states denouncing alleged irregularities, but even if these cases were true they do not seem to be enough to reverse the result.
To win the election in the courts, Trump would have to turn the ballot in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada or Arizona, all of them states in which Biden has already been declared the winner or is clearly leading the vote.
