Amid reports that President Donald Trump is leveraging the tools of government to attack voting rights and disenfranchise millions, a top fascism historian has called on federal agents to oppose his schemes.
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“Trump is attempting to undo the republic to retain personal power,” warned Timothy Snyder, distinguished historian of Nazi and Soviet repression, on Tuesday. “No one in DOJ or FBI should be assisting him in this essentially criminal and anti-American undertaking.”
Snyder posed this along with a new story from the Guardian in which insiders raise the alarm about the Trump administration’s effort to manipulate elections by placing election deniers in key positions and changing rules to limit access to voting.
According to the report, “Since Donald Trump began his second term, numerous 2020 election denialists have been installed in key agencies such as the Department of Justice, the FBI and elsewhere to pursue widely discredited claims of fraud, which can intimidate election workers and voters in swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. The justice department has also filed lawsuits seeking sensitive voter data from 30 states – even though, by law, states control elections – and the FBI has launched investigations into debunked allegations of voting fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin and a few other swing states that Trump lost in 2020.”
What’s more, “Trump in late March this year issued an executive order sharply tightening mail-in voting rules, which Trump has long claimed without evidence contribute to fraud. The order gives the United States Postal Service unprecedented powers to issue new rules making voting by mail harder. The administration’s multi-pronged push to change voting rules is under way despite laws that empower states and Congress to set election rules, sparking lawsuits from states and non-partisan voting rights groups.”
These actions come as Trump and the Republican Party grapple with the likelihood that the Democrats will take back the House in the November midterms, and the possibility that they take back the Senate. This would sharply curtail the president’s ability to execute his agenda and potentially result in his impeachment again. Trump himself sees the writing on the wall, telling GOP lawmakers, “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just gonna be … I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me.”
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The Guardian spoke with several former officials with voting expertise who raised alarm about Trump’s attacks on voting rights.
For example, according to Eileen O’Connor, a senior counsel with the Brennan Center who spent eight years in the Justice Department’s voting section of the civil rights division, “The Department of Justice has no authority to sweep up the voter rolls, which contain private information like driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers, from every state in the nation. The department has 30 active lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia to force the turnover of these sensitive records. So far, eight courts have issued rulings in these cases, and the DoJ has lost each one.” O’Connor stressed that “lawsuits against the states are only one part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration to interfere with elections. The administration has targeted election officials, attempted to rewrite election rules, pardoned January 6 rioters, and elevated election deniers. It has also raised the prospect of deploying federal immigration agents at polling sites – but federal law explicitly bans federal officers from interfering in elections and prohibits armed federal agents from being deployed anywhere an election is held.”
The Guardian piece detailed numerous examples of Trump’s election meddling, from pushing stolen election conspiracies about the Los Angeles mayoral race, to firing staff from the voting section in the civil rights division at the Justice Department who didn’t align with Trump’s views, to placing election deniers in key positions where they are empowered to promote his claims and agenda, and more.
“These attempts are clearly unconstitutional,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at the American University. “Trump’s executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of verified US citizens eligible to vote and the Postal Service to limit mail-in voting, could very well disenfranchise millions of voters while doing nothing to eliminate virtually non-existent voter fraud. Trump is using lies to justify an unprecedented effort to have the federal government take over the administration of elections, despite the Constitution giving the states that power.”
For his part, Snyder — widely considered one of the top experts on authoritarian governments — has consistently warned of Trump’s efforts to use the levers of government to undemocratic ends. In early June, for example, he pointed to Trump’s recent proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50 percent, declaring, “It’s a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely.”
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