Author Archives: Warren Stewart

National: How Trump drove the lie that the election was stolen, undermining voter trust in the outcome | Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

Elena Parent, a Democratic state lawmaker from the Atlanta area, listened incredulously in a small hearing room in early December as a stream of witnesses spun fantastical tales of alleged election fraud before the Georgia Senate’s Judiciary Committee. A retired Army colonel claimed the state’s voting machines were controlled by Communists from Venezuela. A volunteer lawyer with President Trump’s campaign shared surveillance video that she said showed election workers in Atlanta counting “suitcases” of phony ballots that swung Georgia’s election to former vice president Joe Biden. The president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, told the panel: “Every single vote should be taken away from Biden.” “Since this has been debunked repeatedly, what evidence can you give to us that counters what our elections officials presented us with only an hour ago?” Parent asked one of the witnesses, her voice rising in exasperation. When she tried to ask a follow-up question, the Republican committee chairman cut her off. Her questions — and the fact that the claims were misleading, unsubstantiated or just plain false — did little to keep the rumors in check. It didn’t matter that state and local election officials had explained what was in the video and conducted a hand recount to show that the machines were not rigged. It didn’t matter that multiple news outlets detailed, over and over, that there was no evidence of widespread fraud. It didn’t matter that, amid a global pandemic and massive demand for mail ballots, a system under historic strain in fact held up decisively. To preserve his hold on power, Trump has spent the weeks since Election Day promoting falsehoods about voting problems in Georgia and five other states, successfully persuading tens of millions of his supporters to believe a lie — that the election was stolen from him, and from them.

Full Article: How Trump drove the lie that the election was stolen, undermining voter trust in the outcome – The Washington Post

National: The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media | Ben Smith/The New York Times

Antonio Mugica was in Boca Raton when an American presidential election really melted down in 2000, and he watched with shocked fascination as local government officials argued over hanging chads and butterfly ballots. It was so bad, so incompetent, that Mr. Mugica, a young Venezuelan software engineer, decided to shift the focus of his digital security company, Smartmatic, which had been working for banks. It would offer its services to what would obviously be a growth industry: electronic voting machines. He began building a global company that ultimately provided voting machinery and software for elections from Brazil to Belgium and his native Venezuela. He even acquired an American company, then called Sequoia. Last month, Mr. Mugica initially took it in stride when his company’s name started popping up in grief-addled Trump supporters’ wild conspiracy theories about the election. “Of course I was surprised, but at the same time, it was pretty clear that these people were trying to discredit the election and they were throwing out 25 conspiracy theories in parallel,” he told me in an interview last week from Barbados, where his company has an office. “I thought it was so absurd that it was not going to have legs.” But by Nov. 14, he knew he had a problem. That’s when Rudy Giuliani, serving as the president’s lawyer, suggested that one voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, had a sinister connection to vote counts in “Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states.” Mr. Giuliani declared on Twitter that the company “was a front for SMARTMATIC, who was really doing the computing. Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?”

Full Article: The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media – The New York Times

National: Republicans strategize for next elections: ‘Their plan is to make it harder for voters to participate’ | Sam Levine/The Guardian

After record turnout in the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in some states are already signaling they will pursue measures that make it harder to vote in the coming years. The Republican efforts come after an election in which nearly 160 million people voted, the highest in a presidential election in over a century. About half of voters cast their ballots by mail, a big increase from 2016, while about another quarter cast their ballots in person ahead of election day. The GOP backlash underscores how swiftly and severely the party is willing to cut off access to the ballot amid signs of a changing electorate. The baseless accusations of fraud that Donald Trump and other allies continue to levy about the election has offered election officials justification for passing the measures. “There will be some states where it is very clear that the existing power structure is worried about their voters. And part of their job security plan is to make it harder for their voters to participate,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Two states that appear to be at the center of the push are Georgia and Texas, where Republicans are already advocating measures to scale back mail-in voting and other access to the ballot. Both states, traditionally seen as Republican strongholds, are increasingly seen as politically competitive because of demographic shifts, with the electorate becoming much more diverse. In Georgia, there has been significant growth among Black, Hispanic and Asian eligible voters over the last two decades, while Texas has seen a surge in its Latino population.

Full Article: Republicans strategize for next elections: ‘Their plan is to make it harder for voters to participate’ | US news | The Guardian

National: Trump campaign told to preserve all documents related to Sidney Powell and Dominion Voting Systems | Kaitlan Collins, Kevin Liptak and Pamela Brown/CNN

President Donald Trump’s campaign legal team sent a memo to dozens of staffers Saturday instructing them to preserve all documents related to Dominion Voting Systems and Sidney Powell in anticipation of potential litigation by the company against the pro-Trump attorney. The memo, viewed by CNN, references a letter Dominion sent to Powell this week demanding she publicly retract her accusations and instructs campaign staff not to alter, destroy or discard records that could be relevant. A serious internal divide has formed within Trump’s campaign following the election with tensions at their highest between the campaign’s general counsel, Matt Morgan, who sent the memo Saturday, and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Though the campaign once distanced itself from Powell, Trump has been urging other people to fight like she has, according to multiple people familiar with his remarks. He has asked for more people making her arguments, which are often baseless and filled with conspiracy theories, on television. Morgan wrote in the memo, “The Allegations within the letter dated December 16, 2020 reference the Campaign and lawyers who may have performed work for the Campaign. Even with references to the Campaign and some of its outside lawyers, the Campaign does not reasonably anticipate litigation against the Campaign at this time. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Campaign views it as prudent to establish a litigation hold at this time to protect and preserve all rights and privileges that may exist under the law.” The Trump campaign has declined to comment.

Full Article: Trump campaign told to preserve all documents related to Sidney Powell and Dominion Voting Systems – CNNPolitics

National: Michael Flynn: Trump could deploy military to ‘rerun’ election | Jordan Williams/The Hill

Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn on Thursday said that President Trump could deploy the military to “rerun” the 2020 election. During an appearance on Newsmax’s “Greg Kelly Reports,” Flynn was asked about the actions the president could take to undo the results of the election. After Flynn suggested that the president could seize every voting machine across the country, he then suggested deploying the military in swing states that the president lost to President-elect Joe Biden. “He could order, within the swing states if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and basically rerun an election each in those states,” Flynn said. Flynn added that using the military is “not unprecedented,” saying that people talk about it “like it’s something that we’ve never done,” but he also said he was “not calling for that.” “Martial law has been instituted 64 times,” he said. “So I’m not calling for that. We have a constitutional process, and that has to be followed.”

Full Article: Michael Flynn: Trump could deploy military to ‘rerun’ election | TheHill

National: Lou Dobbs debunks his own claims of election fraud — after Smartmatic sends Fox a legal demand | Jeremy Barr/The Washington Post

Something surprising happened Friday night on Lou Dobbs’s top-rated show on the Fox Business Network. Dobbs, an opinion host and conservative ally of President Trump who has consistently raged over the past month that the president was robbed of a second term by a rigged election, introduced a segment that calmly debunked several accusations of…

National: Trump Discussed Naming Sidney Powell as Special Counsel on Election Fraud | Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs/The New York Times

President Trump on Friday discussed naming Sidney Powell, who as a lawyer for his campaign team unleashed conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States, to be a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud, according to two people briefed on the discussion. It was unclear if Mr. Trump will move ahead with such a plan. Most of his advisers opposed the idea, two of the people briefed on the discussion said, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer. In recent days Mr. Giuliani has sought to have the Department of Homeland Security join the campaign’s efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the election. Mr. Giuliani joined the discussion by phone initially, while Ms. Powell was at the White House for a meeting that became raucous and involved people shouting at each other at times, according to one of the people briefed on what took place. Ms. Powell’s client, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser whom the president recently pardoned, was also there, two of the people briefed on the meeting said. Some senior administration officials drifted in and out of the meeting. During an appearance on the conservative Newsmax channel this week, Mr. Flynn pushed for Mr. Trump to impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election. At one point in the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump asked about that idea.

Full Article: Trump Discussed Naming Sidney Powell as Special Counsel on Election Fraud – The New York Times

National: Fox News retracts Smartmatic voting machine fraud claim in staged video | Richard Luscombe/The Guardian

Fox News has taken a further step back from Donald Trump’s baseless allegations of election fraud with a bizarre apparent legal retraction aired during shows hosted by some of the president’s most fervent supporters. First broadcast on Fox Business on Friday, on Lou Dobbs Tonight, and repeated over the weekend on shows hosted by Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, the segment was presented as a news interview with election technology expert Eddie Perez. In the three-minute video, described as “a closer look at claims about Smartmatic”, Perez answers questions posed by an unidentified interviewer about a Florida company that provided voting systems for the November election. Perez is asked questions such as “Have you seen any evidence that Smartmatic software was used to flip votes anywhere in the US in this election?” and “Have you seen any evidence of Smartmatic sending US votes to be tabulated in foreign countries?” He says he has not seen any such evidence. … Speaking to CNN, Perez said: “My reaction was to observe, as many others have, how kind of strange and unique that particular way at presenting the facts was. “There was nothing in any of the preliminary conversations that I had with Fox News that gave me any indication that Smartmatic would be a matter of conversation. It was never mentioned that this was going to be a discussion about Smartmatic or even claims about private vendors. I was anticipating a broader discussion about the debate around the election [and] election integrity.” Perez said Fox News’ coverage of the election was “speculative and not based in fact” and conspiracy theories peddled by hosts were “harmful to enhancing public confidence in the legitimacy of election outcomes”. “I am not accustomed to seeing Lou Dobbs air very straightforward factual evidence,” he said.

Full Article: Fox News retracts Smartmatic voting machine fraud claim in staged video | Fox News | The Guardian

National: Democrats and Republicans are ending 2020 as far apart as ever on election security | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Any chance of Congress burying old gripes and working together on election security took a serious blow during 2020’s final hearing on the topic. That hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee pitted Christopher Krebs, the former cybersecurity chief fired for affirming the integrity of the election, against allies of President Trump who repeated many of the same debunked election fraud claims already tossed out in dozens of court cases. Republican senators repeatedly asserted the election result was compromised, even though no court has upheld those claims in more than 50 legal cases. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) declared “the election in many ways was stolen,” a claim that has not been endorsed by a single top state election official, Republican or Democrat. Republicans also repeatedly attacked Democrats for expressing concerns about the integrity of the 2016 election, but not the 2020 contest — ignoring the fact that Russian interference in the 2016 election was confirmed by U.S. intelligence agencies and a unanimous report from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, while leading state and federal officials have declared there was no such interference in 2020. At one point the hearing even devolved into a shouting match between Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Gary Peters (Mich.), over unrelated investigations into Hunter Biden, the son of President-elect Joe Biden. Johnson said Peters “lied repeatedly in the press, that I was spreading Russian disinformation,” while Peters replied: “This is not about airing your grievances. … I don’t know what rabbit hole you’re running down.” Nor did Republicans acknowledge reforms that Democrats and election security experts have been pushing for years aimed at raising confidence in future elections. They include ensuring there are paper ballots in all counties that lack them, increasing post-election audits and mandating more transparency by voting-machine vendors.

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Democrats and Republicans are ending 2020 as far apart as ever on election security – The Washington Post

National: Biden and lawmakers raise alarms over cyber breach amid Trump silence | Anne Gearan, Karoun Demirjian, Mike DeBonis and Annie Linskey/The Washington Post

Democrats and some Republicans raised the alarm Thursday about a massive and growing cybersecurity breach that many experts blame on Russia, with President-elect Joe Biden implicitly criticizing the Trump administration for allowing the hacking attack to occur. “We need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyber attacks in the first place,” Biden said in a statement. “Our adversaries should know that, as president, I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation.” President Trump, by contrast, has said nothing about the hack affecting numerous federal agencies as well as U.S. companies. U.S. national security agencies are still assessing the scope and severity of the breach, which was discovered by a commercial firm. The president’s silence about an organized attack on the U.S. government marks the latest example of his persistent reluctance to criticize Russia, which U.S. intelligence agencies have accused of interfering in the 2016 election to help Trump. Throughout his presidency, Trump has contradicted his own government’s findings about 2016 election hacking and disinformation efforts, and he has publicly accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s word that Moscow was blameless.

Full Article: Biden and lawmakers raise alarms over cyber breach amid Trump silence – The Washington Post

National: Federal investigators find evidence of previously unknown tactics used to penetrate government networks | Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima/The Washington Post

Federal investigators reported Thursday on evidence of previously unknown tactics for penetrating government computer networks, a development that underscores the disastrous reach of Russia’s recent intrusions and the logistical nightmare facing federal officials trying to purge intruders from key systems. For days it has been clear that compromised software patches distributed by a Texas-based company, SolarWinds, were central to Russian efforts to gain access into U.S. government computer systems. But Thursday’s alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency at the Department of Homeland Security said evidence suggested there was other malware used to initiate what the alert described as “a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.” While many details remained unclear, the revelation about new modes of attack raises fresh questions about the access that Russian hackers were able to gain in government and corporate systems worldwide. “This adversary has demonstrated an ability to exploit software supply chains and shown significant knowledge of Windows networks,” the alert said. “It is likely that the adversary has additional initial access vectors and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that have not yet been discovered.”

Full Article: Federal investigators find evidence of previously unknown tactics used to penetrate government networks – The Washington Post

National: Pence prepares to oversee Trump’s loss — and then leave town | Gabby Ohr and Nahal Toosi/Politico

On Jan. 6, Vice President Mike Pence will oversee final confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Then he’ll likely skip town. As vice president, Pence has the awkward but unavoidable duty of presiding over the session of Congress that will formalize Biden’s Electoral College victory — a development that is likely to expose him and other Republicans to the wrath of GOP voters who believe President Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him. But Pence could dodge their ire by leaving Washington immediately for the Middle East and Europe. According to three U.S. officials familiar with the planning, the vice president is eyeing a foreign trip that would take him overseas for nearly a week, starting on Jan. 6. Though Pence aides declined to confirm details of the trip, which remains tentative, a U.S. government document seen by POLITICO shows the vice president is due to travel to Bahrain, Israel and Poland, with the possibility of more stops being added. A pre-advance team of Pence aides and other U.S. officials left earlier this week to visit the planned stops in preparation for the multicountry tour, which would be Pence’s first trip abroad since last January, when he traveled to Rome and Jerusalem on a whirlwind two-day sojourn.

Full Article: Pence prepares to oversee Trump’s loss — and then leave town – POLITICO

National: Lawmakers Scrap $500 Million in State Election Security Grants | Billy House/Bloomberg

Congressional negotiators have eliminated $500 million in election security grants to the states from a final version of a measure to fund the U.S. government into 2021, a top House Democrat says. That development comes as President Donald Trump and his allies continue to promote unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the Nov. 3 election, even though their allegations have been rejected by courts and state election officials. Mike Quigley, the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, said Wednesday he’d been told that the omnibus funding package being worked out with Senate negotiators “zeros out” the state assistance money. Quigley, who also serves on the House Intelligence Committee and is an enthusiastic proponent of the grants, called the move short-sighted and the timing “inexplicable,” especially given the threat of cyber attacks and other vulnerabilities faced by voting systems. Evan Hollander, a spokesman for House Appropriations Committee Chair Nita Lowey of New York, declined to confirm that the money was not included. The chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Ben Hovland, said in an interview Wednesday night that he had not been told officially of the fate of the $500 million and that, “it’s not done until it’s done.”

Full Article: Lawmakers Scrap $500 Million in State Election Security Grants – Bloomberg

National: Former CISA Director Krebs again defends election security efforts | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

Chris Krebs, who was fired last month as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency by President Donald Trump after saying that the 2020 presidential election was “the most secure” in U.S. history, repeated that message as a private citizen Wednesday to the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Speaking during a session that the panel’s chairman, Ron Johnson, R-Wis., convened for the purposes of “examining irregularities” with the Nov. 3 election, Krebs held up the work done by his former agency and by state and local election officials who spent nearly four years replacing voting equipment, refining security practices and ensuring that nearly every ballot cast was recorded on paper. “There are a number of different computers, systems, machines involved in the entirety of the election process from registration to ballot design to ballot printing to actual voting, to tabulation,” Krebs said in response to Johnson asking about technologies used in the voting process. “But election officials are very careful that technology is not a single point of failure and that there are security controls before, during and after the process. As long as you have the paper — you can’t hack paper — you can run that process.” While Johnson and some of his fellow Republican members — as well as other witnesses, including some of the attorneys who’ve represented Trump in his unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to overturn his electoral loss — brought up evidence-free claims of fraud, much of the hearing focused on the misinformation about the voting process that’s flooded social media in the weeks since Election Day, as well as the threats and harassment received by election officials. Krebs said that while it’s “pretty straightforward” to debunk the claims, often promoted by the outgoing president and his supporters, that equipment manufactured by certain vendors switched people’s votes, their ongoing prevalence has had deleterious effects on democracy and on the people who conduct the election process. “We’re past the point where we need to be having conversations about the outcome of this election,” Krebs said. “I think continued assaults on democracy, and the outcome of this election, is ultimately corrosive to the institutions that support elections.”

Full Article: Former CISA Director Krebs again defends election security efforts