Under Trump, DHS directed to probe bogus claims about voter fraud
In late April of 2020, a top political appointee in the Trump administration called for Department of Homeland Security officials to scrutinize an unusual topic for a national security agency: possible voter fraud in the upcoming election. A subsequent directive included a focus on mail-in voting, according to a document reviewed by POLITICO.
That guidance came as then-President Donald Trump fomented claims that the expansion of mail-in voting would corrupt the 2020 election — which later fed his unsubstantiated assertions that the election was stolen.
DHS’ intelligence office did not release any materials substantiating the president’s claims. But it did find that the Kremlin spread lies about mail-in voting.
The issuance of a directive involving voter fraud to the DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which has not been previously reported, casts a new light on the extent of Trump World’s efforts to use government resources to investigate spurious claims about U.S. elections.
It also raises new questions about how a domestic political complaint found its way onto the intelligence community’s to-do list.
The House Jan. 6 committee has been probing how Trump’s false claims led to an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the extent of the president and his allies’ efforts to interfere with aspects of the election.
The DHS saga began in late April of 2020, when Ken Cuccinelli — the former Virginia attorney general with close ties to Trump who was then the department’s second-in-command — asked a senior DHS official to have I&A analysts look into the potential for voter fraud related to mail-in voting, according to a former DHS official.
Cuccinelli declined to comment through a spokesperson. A former Trump administration official who worked with him made a sarcastic defense: “How dare a political appointee give work to the agency he oversees?”
The immediate aftermath of that conversation isn’t clear. But later that summer, I&A’s headquarters sent guidance to its Field Operations Division related to elections, which POLITICO has reviewed.
The guidance told employees in the division to look into a host of topics related to elections and security, including hacking attempts targeting campaigns, efforts to intimidate voters, and illegal entry into polling places.
Then came a list of further topics: “attempts to alter, destroy, sell, or hide mail-in ballots,” among other mail-related issues.
The fact that intelligence professionals were directed to look into whether people were selling, hiding, changing, or destroying ballots delivered by mail stuck out to election and intelligence observers because it had not been a focus of widespread credible complaints in earlier elections.
“What makes this inappropriate is that the underlying activity is a fantasy,” said Ben Wittes, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, who tracks issues related to U.S. intelligence agencies. “And there are no circumstances in which the Intelligence Community should be tasked to collect on fantasies.”
By that time, Trump himself had been amplifying conspiracy theories about voting by mail. “Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters,” he said at a White House briefing on April 7, 2020, per NPR. “They’re fraudulent in many cases.” And in a July interview, he told Fox News that mail-in voting would “rig the election.”
Those comments came as many states increased the practice because the pandemic heightened the risks of in-person voting. The notion that selling mail-in ballots is a serious problem — a notion the I&A guidance instructed its personnel to scrutinize — is not supported by widespread evidence.
“The ‘sell, destroy, or hide mail ballots’ — that’s a theoretical conspiracy that I’ve heard talked about, but there’s no evidence that that has occurred,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Colorado election official who works with voting access groups.
Trump referred to this notion in the Sept. 29 presidential debate. “Take a look at West Virginia,” he said. “Mailmen are selling the ballots. They’re being sold.”
In the same debate, Trump also claimed that mail-in ballots get dumped in rivers and creeks.
In I&A’s Field Operations Division, directions to eye voter fraud caused concerns. People in the division raised complaints in a series of listening sessions held in September and October.
“People questioned a tasking related to reporting on voter fraud,” read a memo on the sessions, which POLITICO reviewed. “‘Is this criminal activity appropriate for an IC agency?’ Thresholds and priorities are judgment calls from leadership and many people questioned whether taskings were politically motivated.”
The memo signals that those concerns were part of a larger problem: distrust within the workforce toward management, along with friction over whether the intelligence community should be involved in domestic political affairs.
“The workforce has a general mistrust of leadership resulting from orders to conduct activities they perceive to be inappropriate, bureaucratic, or political,” it continued.
It’s unclear if people in the Field Operations Division looked into whether mail-in ballots were being stolen or sold. But I&A did scrutinize election security issues. On Sept. 3, 2020, the office distributed a product about Russia’s efforts to undermine confidence in American election processes — specifically by using its state media to try to cast doubt on the security of mail-in voting.
As this all unfolded, Joseph Maher was a top lawyer at DHS handling intelligence law matters. A DHS official who wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter said that given his post at the time, Maher likely would have seen the tasking before it received the final greenlight. And he may have been aware of employees’ concerns about it, given he temporarily took over the office in August of 2020.
On Aug. 6, 2021, the Jan. 6 select committee chair announced Maher had joined the staff there, on detail from his post at DHS. The move drew significant criticism, given I&A’s well-documented failures to warn about possible violence in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack. “How in the world do you hire someone who you are investigating?” national security lawyer Mark Zaid told The Wall Street Journal at the time.
The Jan. 6 committee has said Maher has recused himself from all investigative matters related to DHS. Reached for comment, a committee spokesperson directed POLITICO to that prior statement.
A DHS spokesperson said the Department has renewed its commitment to providing quality intelligence to its partners.
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration and the leadership of Secretary Mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security is focused on ensuring the safety and security of communities across our country, while ensuring that all of the Department’s work is conducted with integrity and in ways that protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties, and adhere to all applicable laws,” the spokesperson said. “DHS has also renewed its commitment to providing accurate, timely, and actionable information and intelligence to our partners across every level of government, in the private sector, and local communities.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/1 ... d-00018365
Using government agencies to further your political gains.
We also have this.
Analysis: When 1 in 8 Texas mail ballots gets trashed, that’s vote suppression
If you say — or write — that it’s harder to vote in Texas today than it was a year ago, or four years ago, someone will tell you how easy it is and how full of beans you are.
But what are we supposed to make of the thousands of rejected mail-in ballots during the Republican and Democratic primaries this month? The Texas Tribune’s Alexa Ura and Mandi Cai reported that 18,742 ballots were tossed in 16 of the 20 Texas counties with the most voters. And the Associated Press reported, after a survey of 187 of the state’s 254 counties, that 22,898 mail ballots — 13% of the total — were rejected this year.
The normal rate of rejection is 2%. In the 2020 presidential election, the rejection rate was under 1%.
Republicans in the state Legislature (and above) wanted to tighten the screws on elections in Texas last year, their answer to unsubstantiated claims of widespread irregularities and cheating in the 2020 election. That complaint started with President Donald Trump’s anguish over his reelection loss to Joe Biden and his efforts to upend voting results in enough states to flip the results.
Trump won in Texas in a 2020 election that, all carping aside, marked a pretty good day for Republicans in the state. It was also an election that put a big dent in the popular Democratic idea that “Texas is not a Republican state — it’s a low-turnout state.” In that high (for Texas) turnout election, Republicans won all of the statewide elections and held or improved their numbers in the congressional delegation and the Texas Legislature.
But whining winners and whining losers are nothing new in politics, in Texas or anywhere else. With the former president stewing loudly about his loss, the state’s governor, lieutenant governor and top legislators came to Austin last year with reform on their minds.
Over noisy and temporarily effective opposition from elected Democrats, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a new Texas voting law that included, among other things, bans on around-the-clock voting, drive-thru voting, public officials sending vote-by-mail applications to voters who didn’t request them and changes to mail voting — including new ID requirements — that complicated longstanding practices and evidently confused a lot of voters.
Changes in voting laws often go to courts, and if they’re coming to the courts from Texas, the judges frequently find discrimination and disenfranchisement, whether the subject is voting, elections or redistricting. This new Texas law, being challenged on some of that same familiar ground, is no exception, but the rules have changed. Texas and other states with histories of discrimination used to be required to get federal permission before making changes. That’s no longer the case, so it’s easier for the state to make changes that might not have won approval in the past. While the judges are looking at the latest challenges, there’s an election underway, and in this first test of the new law, about one of every eight mail ballots was thrown out.
Every eighth person who voted by mail didn’t get their vote counted. Depending on where those voters live and how they voted, that’s a big enough number to change the results of some races. In Harris County, the AP reported, 19% of the mail ballots were tossed out, or nearly 7,000. By comparison, the state’s largest county rejected only 135 ballots in the last midterm election in 2018.
It’s not like Texas has a lot of votes to throw away. The turnout was dismal in these primaries: 82.5% of the state’s registered voters were no-shows. About 3 million voters took part: a little under 2 million in the Republican primary and just over 1 million in the Democratic primary. About 14.2 million of registered voters in Texas blew off the primaries.
Every voter in a low-turnout election has more clout; their choices are diluted by fewer other voters than in a high-turnout election. Trashing 23,000 votes in the wake of new legislative restrictions on voting almost sounds like a crime. The election-doubters who tightened Texas voting laws in the name of secure elections would have gone to town if they had found that many people disenfranchised by scammers.
They’d have found their long-sought but never-proved evidence of widespread election tampering. At least they know who did it this time — and so do the rest of us.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/18 ... n-ballots/
But the Repugs will say those voters didn't have legal ballots and the right to vote. It would be interesting to find out how many of the 23,000 ballots were for Dems vs Repugs and how many would have made a difference in the outcome of the election.