On May 17, 2026, Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures, “Well, there's a ton of evidence that the election was rigged,” referring to the 2020 presidential election Trump lost to Joe Biden. He added, “That's not something that DOJ needs to tell you about. There's been evidence about that for many, many years.” Asked whether there would ever be a definitive answer on whether the 2020 election was stolen, Blanche said, “I'm not going to promise there's going to be a definitive answer.”
Blanche described the investigations this way: “What I can tell you is that we have multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Georgia — in Fulton County, Georgia.” On timing, he said, “It takes a lot of work to uncover what happened in 2020.” He said the public would learn what investigators found, “whether it's charges, whether it's a report, whether it's the results of an investigation.” Democracy Docket reported that Blanche could not explain why the Justice Department had not released the evidence to the public.
The statement matters because Blanche is the acting attorney general of the United States. As The Independent noted, the court cases, recounts, committee probes and press investigations that followed the 2020 election “have not yielded any proof of the president's ongoing claims that he won the contest.” Chris Krebs, then director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, described the 2020 election as “the most secure in American history,” and Trump fired him, CBS News has reported.
The interview followed FBI Director Kash Patel's April 19, 2026 appearance on Bartiromo's show, where, according to Democracy Docket, Patel said the evidence was readily available and that arrests would come as soon as that week. Blanche's answers left open that no charges would follow. The FBI has also reportedly assembled a “payback squad” of agents willing to take on political cases, The Independent reported.
Correction (October 2, 2026): This entry previously said Blanche “conceded” that the DOJ had not released evidence that had existed “for many, many years”; his actual words were that the evidence was “not something that DOJ needs to tell you about,” and the point about unreleased evidence is Democracy Docket's reporting. His reference to the investigations was misquoted and has been corrected. The entry also cited roughly 60 court rulings, a William Barr quote, a reported Brennan indictment timeline, and Trump's April 22 Virginia post and Louisiana's May 1 primary order without a source; those have been removed or replaced with sourced statements from The Independent and CBS News, and the title now uses Blanche's word, “rigged.”