There’s been a DOJ sighting.

After weeks of wondering about the seeming disappearance of our nation’s federal law enforcement apparatus, Attorney General William Barr sat down with the Associated Press yesterday to briefly discuss a matter that’s been of passing interest to some 74 million of us: whether the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.

We’re sure Barr and the 113,000 taxpayer-funded employees his office oversees have been busy with other things — prosecuting James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and the rest of those Spygate conspirators for one. And nailing that senior-level mastermind of the entire plot, Kevin Clinesmith, to the wall for another.

Oh, wait. But they’ve been busy. With other things. Honest.

“Disputing President Donald Trump’s persistent, baseless claims,” the AP gleefully reports, “Barr declared Tuesday the U.S. Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.”

Right. Baseless claims. Like the baseless claim of the massive ballot dump of Pennsylvania votes that favored Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a margin of 570,000 to 3,200 — or 99.4% to 0.6% for you math majors. Or the similar-though-not-as-stark “spike anomalies” in — miraculously enough — three other swing states: Michigan (twice), Wisconsin, and Georgia.

As the AP piece continues, “Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but ‘to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.’”

“Other administration officials who have come out forcefully against Trump’s allegations of voter-fraud evidence have been fired,” notes the AP goadingly but incorrectly. “But it’s not clear whether Barr might suffer the same fate.” (Only a single administration official, DHS cybersecurity head Christopher Krebs, was fired — not the AP’s plural “other administration officials.” As for Krebs, one wonders how thorough an election-security analysis he might’ve been able to do in just a few short days — enough to have self-servingly declared it, as he did, “the most secure in American history”?)

As for the massive fraud that involves data manipulation, Barr notes, “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that. … Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations. And those have been run down.”

Barr’s assertion about the “very particularized” nature of the many fraud allegations that have been collected by the Trump legal team makes perfect sense. But all it would take to turn an election is a handful of “spike anomalies” like the ones mentioned above. We wonder whether the AG is aware of these particular allegations and has run them down as well.

And we wonder, more generally, what ever happened to the Bill Barr who gave a dire warning to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer three months ago when he was asked about the potential for fraud when massive mail-in balloting is introduced.

“This is playing with fire,” Barr told Blitzer in early September. “We’re a very closely divided country here, and people have to have confidence in results of the election and the legitimacy of the government. And people trying to change the rules to this methodology — which as a matter of logic is very open to fraud and coercion — is reckless and dangerous. And people are playing with fire.”

As for Rudy Giuliani and the rest of President Trump’s legal team, they clearly see things a bit differently than Barr. “With all due respect to the attorney general,” Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis said yesterday, “there hasn’t been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation. We have gathered ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they have not examined. We have many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud. … As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ. The Justice Department also hasn’t audited any voting machines or used their subpoena powers to determine the truth.”