The United States Attorney General William Barr has ordered prosecutors to probe alleged irregularities in the recently held presidential election.
Current President Donald Trump has refused to accept Joe Biden’s projected victory and has made fraud claims during the early period of voting.
The president’s campaign is praying an emergency injunction in Pennsylvania to prevent Mr Biden’s victory from being certified in the state.
Biden’s projected win in Pennsylvania on Saturday took him over the threshold of 270 electoral college votes which is the needed amount of electoral votes to secure victory nationwide.
According to BBC, the attorney general wrote that inquiries could be made by federal prosecutors “if there are clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual state”.
Barr said prosecutors should only look into “substantial allegations” of irregularities, and that “specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims” should be ignored.
He acknowledged that individual states had the primary responsibility for the conduct of elections but said the justice department had “an obligation to ensure that federal elections are conducted in such a way that the American people can have full confidence in their electoral process and their government”.
The department would normally only go beyond preliminary investigations after an election had been concluded and the results certified, but Mr Barr said this could result in situations where “misconduct cannot realistically be rectified”.
Similarly, Trump campaign filed a lawsuit on Monday in a Pennsylvania federal court, seeking an emergency injunction to stop state officials from certifying Mr Biden’s victory in the state. The state’s Attorney General, Josh Shapiro, called the lawsuit “meritless”.
Prosecutors in Republican-controlled states meanwhile threw their weight behind the president’s challenge to the election results.
The 10 state attorneys general filed a so-called amicus brief at the US Supreme Court backing the Trump campaign’s case in Pennsylvania.