William Barr, the US attorney-general, said there was “no basis” for seizing voting machines or appointing a special counsel to look into voter fraud, in a clear rejection of President Donald Trump’s increasingly desperate attempts to overturn the election result.
Mr Barr’s intervention comes at a febrile time in Washington, as Mr Trump and his allies explore extrajudicial ways of reversing the election outcome with just 30 days until Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Sidney Powell, a lawyer who has promoted a conspiracy theory that the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez was behind a scheme to plant faulty voting machines across the US, met Mr Trump at the White House at the weekend. The president has reportedly considered appointing Ms Powell as special counsel to investigate voter fraud.