It was clear from the outset that Donald Trump’s administration would include high-ranking government officials who either endorsed his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, or refused to publicly admit he lost.
The president continues to hammer a baseless narrative that the election was rigged against him, vowing publicly that it must never “happen again” as he deploys officials to prepare for midterm elections with the balance of power in Congress — and his agenda — at stake.
Before she was tapped as Trump’s “election integrity” official at the Department of Homeland Security, Heather Honey reportedly told a group of right-wing activists in March that the president could declare a “national emergency” to effectively take control of local election administration.
She said the move would follow an “actual investigation” of the 2020 election, if it revealed “manipulation” of the results, according to The New York Times, which had a recording of the call.
“We have some additional powers that don’t exist right now,” she said. “[W]e can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.”
She added that she does not know whether such federal control of elections would be “feasible” or if the people surrounding the president “would let him test that theory.”
But in the months that followed, the president has launched an aggressive effort to radically reshape elections, from redrawing congressional maps to promising an executive order he says would eliminate mail-in voting altogether.
“We’re going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt,” Trump said in August.
Trump has also backed a measure from Republicans in Congress that would upend how states register people to vote online or through automatic or same-day registration, an effort fueled by a bogus claim that noncitizens are fraudulently voting in federal elections.
“We don’t want it to happen again,” We can never let what happened in the 2020 election happen again,” Trump said in the Oval Office Tuesday.
He suggested FBI director Kash Patel and intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard are investigating the results.
“I know Kash is working on it. Everybody’s working on it. And certainly Tulsi is working on it. We can’t let that happen again to our country,” he said.
Heather Honey also alarmed state election officials on a call last month where she reportedly infused a discussion about voting safeguards with rhetoric that echoed right-wing conspiracy theories.
On the September 11 call with the National Association of Secretaries of State Elections Committee, she discussed her current role and Homeland Security’s election security-related work, among other issues, a group spokesperson told The Independent.
Honey, a protege of prominent election conspiracy theorist Cleta Mitchell, was tapped earlier this year to serve as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in Homeland Security’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans to oversee the nation’s election infrastructure.
But she complained that the agency’s employees tasked with combating election misinformation had “strayed from their mission,” according to The New York Times.
She also mentioned a report routinely touted by conspiracy theorists to support bogus claims that voting machines were rigged to favor Democrats, The Times reported, citing people familiar with the call.
Top administration officials have repeatedly refused to admit Trump lost the 2020 election, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, who repeatedly evaded answering affirmatively that Joe Biden won during her under-oath Senate confirmation hearing.
But officials who explicitly embraced Trump’s election lies are working across the government in positions that critics fear could be weaponized against election administration.
Kurt Olsen, a former Trump campaign lawyer who worked on “Stop the Steal” efforts to overturn election results, is working for the administration as a “special government employee,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
He is reportedly “asking intelligence agencies for information about the 2020 election,” including voting machines, the WSJ reported.
Ed Martin, another “Stop the Steal” lawyer and defense attorney for January 6 rioters, was tapped to lead a “weaponization working group” at the Department of Justice to review what he believes are “political” prosecutions against the president.
Marci McCarthy, who spread false claims about voting machines in Georgia when she was chair of the DeKalb County Republican Party, also was hired as director of public affairs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, in Homeland Security.
Nearly all of CISA’s election experts were purged from the agency earlier this year.
After hearing about the administration’s cuts to the agency, state officials left last month’s call with Honey “confused and anxious” as she “made unspecified claims of censorship at the agency,” according to The Times.
She reportedly also referred to a report that right-wing activists have used to undermine voting machines and suggested states would plan to use “fusion centers” — law enforcement collaborations typically used for large-scale events like the Super Bowl — for election security issues.
The CISA cuts have dismantled “nearly all” of Homeland Security’s capacity to protect election infrastructure, according to David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research
“The hiring of an election conspiracy theorist with no election knowledge or expertise is the culmination of this reversal,” Becker told ProPublica earlier this year. “DHS now appears poised to become a primary amplifier of false election conspiracies pushed by our enemies.”
The Independent has requested comment from DHS.
“Anyone who cares about the right to vote needs to be clear-eyed about what’s at stake right now,” Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the States United Democracy Center, said in a statement to The Independent. “We know who these people are, the lies they've told about elections, and the actions they've taken to undermine our system. It’s now more important than ever to be paying attention to what they’re saying and doing because they have the backing of the federal government.”
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