Election Interference Now Comes From Inside the ‘White House’ Itself!

DONALD TRUMP BACK AT WORKING THE BLIND SIDE . . .

by Selvam Canagaratna

“An American presidential campaign resembles a forced march through enemy territory.”

– Lewis Lapham,

Imperial Masquerade, 1990.

In 2016, Russian hackers attacked the Democratic National Committee and other high-profile Democratic targets. This year, the government that’s interfering most aggressively in the 2020 US election isn’t Vladimir Putin’s — it’s Trump’s very own!

The most infamous example until now of Trump’s use of the powers of state for electoral ends was his attempted shakedown of the Ukrainian government — for which Trump was ultimately impeached.

Just a few weeks after he was acquitted in the Senate, Trump hired Richard Grenell, a longtime Republican operative who also served as Ambassador to Germany, to serve as acting Director of National Intelligence. Grenell’s main accomplishment in that position was stoking the conspiracy Trump has dubbed ‘Obamagate’.

Democrats warned that if Trump wasn’t taught a lesson by way of impeachment, he would simply be emboldened to keep abusing his office for political purposes. And he has!

Using his rarefied government perch, Grenell selectively declassified intelligence in order to suggest that Biden had illegally spied on Trump’s campaign in 2016 — part of an effort to turn the actual misdeeds of Trump’s inner circle into a conspiracy theory about his opponent — an electoral disinformation campaign run by the United States government!

“I think you’ll go down as the all-time great ‘Acting’ ever, at any position,” Trump told Grenell admiringly as he exited the DNI role. Grenell promptly took a job with the Republican National Committee.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Bill Barr has suggested he might soon release the “Durham Report,” the Justice Department’s investigation of Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election. The Attorney General has made no secret about the timing. “I’ve said there are going to be developments, significant developments, before the election,” he said in an interview on Fox News last month.

Despite public pressure from Trump, Barr has said that he doesn’t expect the Durham Report to lead to any criminal investigations of Biden or former President Barack Obama, and has lamented “increasing attempts to use the criminal justice system as a political weapon.” But in late August — in the middle of the Republican National Convention that was itself held, in part, at the White House — the Justice Department announced it was requesting more information from four Democratic governors on their handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, while “evaluating whether to initiate investigations.” They included the governors of Michigan and Pennsylvania, two swing states at the centre of Trump’s re-election strategy. “This really does smell,” a former DOJ official told HuffPost.

Barr, meanwhile, has used his position as the nation’s chief law enforcement official to spread false information about voter fraud, in an attempt to influence the conduct of the election itself. On CNN, in an effort to impugn the legitimacy of mail-in voting, he invented a story about a Texas man who voted 1,700 times in one election — something his office later conceded never happened!

On Tuesday, in a move the New York Times called “highly unusual,” the Justice Department intervened in defense of Trump in an ongoing defamation lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who has alleged that Trump raped her in the 1990s. Trump denied the charge and claimed she had fabricated the story because she was “selling a new book.” The government’s official position is that when Trump said Carroll was “not my type”, he “was acting within the scope of his office or employment at the time,” according to the department’s court filing.

It’s a major assist to Trump, who was facing mounting legal bills from the case. He faces the prospect of having to provide DNA evidence and testify under oath in the coming months. As the Times put it, “The motion also effectively protects Mr. Trump from any embarrassing disclosures in the middle of his campaign for re-election.” In 2016, Trump had Michael Cohen to hush up damaging personal revelations. Now he has the DOJ.

Some synergy between policy and politics is to be expected — and it’s natural that someone who violated the Fair Housing Act as a businessman would continue to undermine it as President! In the Trump administration, in 2020, it is impossible to tell where the government ends and the campaign begins.

The same holds true at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which held a citizenship ceremony at the White House during the recent convention as part of a stunt to soften the President’s image. At the same time, the agency was poised to disenfranchise between 200,000 and 300,000 citizens-in-waiting by delaying their naturalization process.

“The absence of these hundreds of thousands of ‘missing voters’, many of whom live in swing states,” argued the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, “could be sufficient to sway the election.”

Rarely has the government interference been as explicit as it was in August, when Trump bragged that he was starving the United States Postal Service of bailout funds it had requested in the hopes of sabotaging mail-in balloting in the presidential election. “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said. “But if they don’t get those two items…that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”

Trump, after botching the government’s response to the pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 Americans, has also tried to exploit the crisis. He has repeatedly floated the prospect of making a Covid-19 vaccine available before the election — perhaps, he said last Friday, as early as October. Thankfully public health officials, at least so far, sound more reluctant to get involved in Trump’s election schemes.

Although Food and Drug Administration officials have insisted their vaccine approval process will not be influenced by the campaign, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a memo to states last week instructing them to be prepared to distribute a vaccine by November 1 — two days before Trump’s self-imposed election deadline. The problem with a President who uses public policy for personal ends is you can never really tell when one becomes another.

Last month, Politico reported that the Department of Health and Human Services is considering spending up to $250 million on a media blitz to “defeat despair and inspire hope” on the pandemic in the coming months. While public-service announcements are hardly unusual, the spending blitz prompted a concerned letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar from Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), wondering if it was “a thinly-veiled effort to use taxpayer dollars on a propaganda campaign to support the President’s re-election effort.”

And this summer Trump deployed federal law enforcement agencies and in some cases the military to American cities to suppress protests — in an attempt to reshape the narrative around which his national campaign is unfolding, which is the notion that Americans won’t be safe in Biden’s America. On Wednesday, a whistleblower at the Department of Homeland Security alleged that top officials at the agency used their power to manipulate intelligence reports in order “to ensure they matched up with the public comments by Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and ‘anarchist’ groups” — in other words, they cooked up the justification for Trump’s campaign attacks against Biden. DHS was simultaneously squelching information about Russian interference because it would reflect poorly on the President. Covering up election interference is also a form of election interference.

Remember, just days before the 2018 midterms, Trump sent 5,000 troops to the US-Mexican border in a barely-concealed gambit to force Democrats on the defensive.

The 2018 ploy was, of course, a failure. And therein lies the silver lining for Democrats. Trump has demonstrated practically every day the fragility of political norms; the separation of campaigning and governance exists more or less on the honour system. It turns out it’s incredibly easy to cynically treat the federal bureaucracy like an arm of the RNC. But when you’re doing it all in plain sight, sometimes that itself becomes the story!