MSNBC’s Chris Hayes opened his show Friday going off on the Justice Department and Attorney General Bill Barr over its handling of discarded ballots discovered in Pennsylvania this week.

After President Donald Trump didn’t say if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power, Hayes reacted to his “chilling” remarks by telling viewers, “He’s plotting, in open, in public, repeatedly, a coup to steal the election and hold onto power.”

Now, he said Friday, “the attorney general of the United States and the Department of Justice are colluding with the president and his campaign to sabotage the legitimacy of the election.”

“This has been the fear of those of us who care about the fatef our democracy. Attorney General Barr has been telegraphing this is the play for a while now. He’s been going around lying about the rates of mail-in voter fraud, boosting the president’s dangerous and insidious false narrative. He even went so far as to tell a completely false inflammatory story about a supposed case of fraud in Texas which he later had to correct,” Hayes said. “But yesterday we saw the first instance of all the machinery working together.”

News broke out of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania of nine ballots found discarded, seven of which were reportedly cast for the president. Hayes noted how Trump shared the news early on, and how subsequently ABC News reported Trump was briefed on the matter by Barr beforehand.

Hayes said what the Trump campaign is saying about supposedly throwing out Trump ballots “appears to be an almost comically innocent story about a clerical error likely driven by the Trump campaign’s own lawsuit.”

He reviewed the issue with the ballots in question and said, “Clearly someone messed up. These envelopes should not have been opened. And of course ballots should not be randomly thrown away. Don’t do that. That’s bad. But there is zero evidence anything deliberately criminal happening here at all. And it is completely inappropriate for the U.S. Attorney’s office to be basically live tweeting their findings as they investigate this, including having to pull them down and correct them. DOJ policy calls for keeping voter fraud investigations under wraps to avoid affecting the election outcome. This was an obvious clear violation of that policy by the U.S. Attorney and William Barr, the president. But now we see what the plan is.”

Hayes concluded by saying there are certainly election “screw-ups” and logistical issues, but asked viewers to “imagine a politicized Department of Justice seeking to seize on every logistical hiccup and blast it out to the nation of smoking gun evidence of a vast conspiracy to steal the election from the president… that is what they are doing.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/344emGA