Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the most outspoken Democrats on the committee, asked former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer about Barr's unfounded claim that foreign countries will meddle in the 2020 election by mass producing counterfeit ballots.
Barr has "provided an echo for the president, who has voted himself by mail in New York and in Florida and whose party encourages its members to go out and vote by mail — but he's echoed the president in saying there's something wrong with voting by mail, and he's alleged that voting by mail makes us vulnerable to foreign influence by counterfeit ballots," Raskin said to Ayer. "Is that an appropriate role for the attorney general of the United States?"
"I think it's not, and especially it's not because it appears to be something that there's absolutely no truth in at all," Ayer said. "There are five states that do nothing but vote by mail, and every other state, I think virtually every other state, uses vote by mail somewhat substantially."
"So the idea that we're going to throw cold water on the notion that we're going to vote by mail is just disreputable," Ayer continued. "And it's entirely inappropriate, it really isn't his job anyway. If there were some law enforcement function there it might be. But basically he's just echoing the president."
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Elias told the committee in his opening remarks that the DOJ, under Barr's stewardship, abused its antitrust power to investigate ten proposed mergers and acquisitions in the marijuana industry because Barr "did not like the nature of their underlying business."
He testified that after antitrust staff expressed concerns about being used as a tool to harass firms, the head of the division convened a staff meeting and "acknowledged that the investigations were motivated by the fact that the cannabis industry is unpopular 'on the fifth floor,' a reference to Attorney General Barr's offices in the D.O.J. headquarters building."
Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked Elias to elaborate on his allegations and asked why he considered the ten investigations to be "sham" probes that were "predicated on the personal interests of the attorney general and the president rather than the facts or a desire to protect American consumers."
Elias told Jayapal that "dozens" of staff attorneys, paralegals, economists, and others who worked on the cases. He confirmed that the first of the ten companies produced millions of documents from the files of 40 employees at the DOJ's request.
"That was just from the first of the ten mergers," Elias said.
"And when the DOJ received these documents, is there any evidence that the entirety of these documents were even reviewed?" Jayapal asked.
"I think a very small number of the documents were reviewed," he said.
In one of the reviews, Elias added, the documents were uploaded near the end of the investigation, "as if they were irrelevant to the investigation and its process."
"So, to be clear, at Attorney General Barr's direction, the department expends countless taxpayer resources to force companies to ultimately produce millions of pages of evidence, and then doesn't even look at or upload some of that evidence before admitting there's no violation," Jayapal said.
She continued: "Now, Mr. Elias, given your experience in public service, have you ever seen anything this extreme? Using taxpayer dollars to conduct an investigation, over the course of months, on an entire industry, and not even uploading evidence before admitting that there's no violation?"
Elias replied: "In my experience, which includes 14 years at the Justice Department, at many different levels of the antitrust division, no, I've never seen anything like that."
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Swalwell asked Zelinsky what prompted him to withdraw as counsel for the government in Stone's case after senior leadership publicly overruled him and other prosecutors to seek a lesser sentence for Stone.
Zelinsky responded that he withdrew because "what had happened was wrong, and I did not want to be a part of what had happened."
