Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 01:50 pm
There is an old saying that an important difference between a nation of laws and fascism is that the police in democracies following the law only investigate reports of a crime. Fascist dictatorships harness the police to investigate people to find something to justify a pre-determined outcome. According to a blockbuster report in Politico, the Trump administration’s DHS Cyber Security Agency (the police) investigated Arizona and its voting machines, a problematic “person,” who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
In late December of 2020, Arizona State Rep. Mark Finchem (almost surely on behalf of the White House as a long-time Trump ally) made a unique request to Homeland Security’s little known department, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, requesting “a full spectrum forensic examination” of Arizona’s voting machines. As typical of the corrupt Trump administration, the request from a state representative was on the desk of the director of the department the next day, the morning of Christmas Eve of 2020. Brandon Wales, the “acting-director” of the little-known agency, received the request as a top priority at 7:59 a.m. All of eight minutes later, Wales wrote, “We need to do a call on this today,” in a message to several people, including the agency’s then-deputy chief external affairs officer.
In other words, an unknown state representative called up a highly-specialized and sophisticated federal agency to report a person (Arizona) and requested that the specialized unit find a crime – or mistake – within the Arizona computer vote tabulators. This is new reporting and if one appreciates the utter insanity of it, jaw-dropping.
According to Politico:
The emails to the DHS agency, known as CISA, are part of a tranche of new communications that show Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his allies’ attempts to get the federal government to help them reverse election results went even broader than previously known. American Oversight, a watchdog group, obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and shared them with POLITICO.
Ah, interesting. The above paragraph links two critical stories from just last week. We see part of Junior’s text to Mark Meadows in action. Trump “controlled” the federal government and would use that control as “leverage,” working on behalf of the Trump campaign, not the American people. (“Control,” and “leverage” being key words in Junior’s text). And in yet another theme continuing from last week, it took a FOIA request from an outside ethics group to discover that a campaign utilized government resources in its quest to win. Arizona is in charge of its vote and it didn’t undertake this action. Trump was in charge of the federal government at the time and it did. We are not learning this critical new information through an FBI investigation of the post-2020 election period, or even from the overworked House Oversight Committee. A group of regular citizens made the discovery.
Politico moves on:
Perhaps even more significantly, the emails underscore that Trump’s stalwart allies in his baseless quest to contest his loss to Joe Biden are still core parts of his network heading into a possible 2024 White House bid. Finchem, in particular, worked overtime in the weeks after the 2020 election to try to reverse Biden’s win in his swing state. And last September, Trump endorsed his bid to become Arizona’s secretary of state, in charge of its 2024 ballot.
Perhaps I’m more cynical than Politico or perhaps more willing to speculate, but it would seem to a neutral observer that Finchem likely didn’t come up with the idea on his own, to say he did on must ignore the fact that Trump was putting maximum pressure on Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to do the same type of audit, again. The amazing thing is that DHS would take a call from an unknown state representative and treat it as a near presidential order, acting on it the next day. Perhaps because it actually was akin to a presidential order. Perhaps.
After all, as Politico points out, this request didn’t happen in a vacuum, the administration had wanted, or at least discussed, simply seizing every voting machine in problematic states like Arizona. Perhaps the request was simply the next best alternative:
POLITICO reviewed a second, similar draft executive order that would have had the Department of Homeland Security take on that project, rather than DOD. The same week, Giuliani called DHS’ second-in-command to ask if his department could seize the voting machines, The New York Times reported. That official, Ken Cuccinelli, told him that wouldn’t be possible.
Politico’s report does nothing but reinforces the insane actions that Trump was willing to consider in his “leveraging control” of the federal government for his personal benefit and how close this country came to an even bigger Constitutional crisis had people like Cuccinelli and Ducey not held their ground. There were plenty of Finchems running around.
Oh, and Junior was just uncannily accurate in his November 5th, 2020 text to Meadows. It is like he could see the future, or knew of a plan formed even before the election.
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