During a bitter “60 Minutes” interview with CBS News’ Kristen Welker, President Donald Trump repeated his debunked claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and attacked her as “crooked” for disagreeing. But journalist Jose Pagliery, writing for NOTUS, lays out a variety of way in which the Trump-era U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is undermining — not promoting or encouraging — ways to keep American elections safe and secure.
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“President Donald Trump says ‘if you don’t have honest voting, you can’t really have a nation,'” Pagliery explains in his NOTUS article. “But five months out from the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, his Justice Department has canceled election-integrity training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, fired most of the lawyers in its Public Integrity Section and failed to replace the director of its Election Crimes Branch.”
Pagliery elaborates, “Moreover, the DOJ has not taken the usual steps to establish a ‘command center’ to monitor and address the typical emergencies that pop up around Election Day, three sources with knowledge of the situation told NOTUS. A command center team would address things like voter intimidation and targeted disinformation meant to hinder a fair process. These actions — and inactions — have alarmed current and former prosecutors, who say the Justice Department is not prepared to deal with threats to election integrity in the November elections.”
Democrat Ryan Crosswell is among the former prosecutors who is sounding the alarm.
Crosswell told NOTUS, “Obviously, the command center and training are something that anybody who wants to protect election integrity would want. And this just feeds into the fear that rather than protect elections, the DOJ may try to interfere with them. That’s pretty scary.”
The command center, according to Crosswell, “spoke to how seriously we took” election security.
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According to Gary M. Restaino, a former DOJ federal prosecutor, Trump allies never should have decimated an election security unit called PIN.
Restaino told NOTUS, “There’s a massive knowledge gap now. PIN was a bulwark. It had people looking down the middle of the road and putting on political blinders. And the command center is critical to act uniformly across states.”
Pagliery notes that in the past, DOJ prosecutors “who encountered suspected election-related crimes would routinely check with the experts at PIN in Washington before making moves.”
According to another NOTUS source, “For example, as one former DOJ official put it, PIN might reject a request to subpoena the bank records of a frontrunner candidate on the eve of an election, but it might greenlight an FBI search of the home of a clearly long-shot candidate caught stealing money from their own campaign. The goal is always the same: to not put a thumb on the scales.”
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