The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the meetings, but an official who was not authorized to speak on the record told WIRED at the time: “The White House does not comment on mysterious meetings with unnamed staff.”
Along with this, Trump has also demanded to clear the officials of any wrongdoing in view of the 2020 elections. Last year, Trump granted a “full, complete and unconditional” pardon to a group of people who tried but failed to help him overturn the 2020 election results. In recent months, Trump has pressured Colorado Governor Jared Polis to release Tina Peters, the former county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, who became a hero to right-wing election deniers after she helped contain a security breach during a software update of her county’s election management system.
Peters was convicted of four felonies, but Trump has been waging a campaign in recent months to have him released, even saying he would “pardon” him, even though he has no power to do so because he was convicted on state charges.
interference on election day
Although Trump has not announced specific plans to deploy troops to polling sites or seize voting machines, he and his administration are certainly suggesting that such action is not possible.
In January, Trump expressed regret over the National Guard not seizing some voting machines after the 2020 election. In early February, White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt told reporters that although she had not heard Trump specifically discuss the possibility, she “cannot guarantee that an ICE agent will not be in the vicinity of a polling place in November.” (The question was in response to former White House adviser Steve Bannon’s statement: “We’re going to gut ICE in the November elections. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again… We’re never going to allow an election to be stolen again.”)
Earlier this month, during his confirmation hearing to lead the Department of Homeland Security, Senator Markway Mullin said he would be willing to deploy ICE to polling places to deal with “a specific threat.”
The result of the Trump administration’s threats and dog whistles is that those contesting elections in states across the country are already war-gaming about what would happen if ICE or the National Guard show up at their polling places.
Michael McNulty, policy director at Issue One, a nonprofit that tracks the influence of money in politics, also points to the fact that the Justice Department sent monitors to monitor elections in New Jersey and California in November, despite there being no federal election. “The concern is that this could be a large-scale deployment of observers by the DOJ in 2026, who may do something else, whether it’s intimidation, whether it’s interfering with local election officials, getting data to corroborate conspiracy theories,” McNulty told WIRED.
FBI raid
On January 28, the FBI raided an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, executing a search warrant that allowed it to seize ballots, ballot images, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls related to the 2020 election. The search warrant affidavit unsealed a few weeks ago shows that the FBI relied on the work of Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who was appointed by the administration in October to investigate election security and who has a long history of working with some of the country’s biggest election deniers, including Patrick Byrne, Mike Lindell and Kari Lake. Olsen’s claims are based on debunked and previously untested conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
The raid was also notable for the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who, according to The Guardian, is running a parallel investigation into the 2020 election with Trump’s apparent tacit approval.
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