MSNBC host Joe Scarborough slammed Attorney General William Barr for claiming he was unaware of state laws on the legality of voting twice.
In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Barr tiptoed around a question regarding President Trump’s comments at a recent campaign stop in North Carolina encouraging voters to show up to the polls on Election Day and file an absentee ballot.
“He is an extraordinarily bad public servant,” Scarborough said, referring to Barr.
His co-host and wife, Mika Brzezinski, added that Barr was a “bad guy” after showing the clip of him appearing confused.
Barr said he didn’t know the state law in North Carolina, prompting pushback by Blitzer, who confirmed that it’s illegal to vote twice.
“Maybe you can change your vote up to a particular time. I don’t know what the law is,” Barr said.
Barr also brushed off a question asking if Trump actually encouraged people to vote twice as “cheap talk” and insisted that mass mail-in voting could lead to potential fraud. He argued that widespread mail-in ballots, which are being considered amid the coronavirus pandemic, haven’t been tested before, making the process susceptible to possible error.
Blitzer pushed back by saying that a handful of states only have mail-in voting and have “virtually” no problems.
Scarborough also said Barr’s comments are a marker of the current era, which he said will not be looked kindly upon in the future.
“They have saved us from having to explain the depths to which they plunged during the Trump era,” he said. “All we have to do is play our grandchildren those two clips, and they’ll look at us and they’ll say, ‘Granddad, that must have been really bad.'”
