With the midterms right around the corner and President Donald Trump relentlessly pressing his conspiracies about voter fraud, an insider and whistleblower from his first term has revealed that his “tin-foil hat” plan to “interfere in the democratic process” is underway. This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first administration and exposed a number of its secrets. On Wednesday, he sounded the alarm that a plot Trump began nearly a decade ago is coming to its most dangerous phase.
Read more Trump biographer exposes the odd privilege Natalie Harp was given
Over the course of the past year, Trump and his allies have been asked repeatedly whether federal troops will be stationed at polling places during the midterms. They have tended to dodge the question, saying there are “no plans” to do so without ruling it out. But “evidently,” writes Taylor, “all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place. While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent.”
Taylor is referencing new bombshell reporting by the Washington Post, which revealed on Tuesday, writes Taylor, “that hundreds of federal immigration officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including the specialists who vet immigration applications for fraud and security threats, have been pulled off their day jobs and reassigned to monitor voting lists for supposed noncitizen voters. This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the Department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections.” Despite the fact that they are being intentionally obscure about this, says Taylor, “the Trump administration expects Americans to trust that they are merely hunting for ‘illegal’ registrants. Yet the operation raises urgent questions about potential abuse, oversight, and whether DHS agents will play a larger role in unlawfully purging American citizens from voter rolls.”
It’s all part of a wider effort, asserts Taylor, to convert “the Justice Department’s Voting Section from a shield for voters into a weapon against them. His administration has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia to extract voter roll data, ordered federal agencies to build ‘approved’ lists of voters, and as we speak, is still moving ahead with plans to control the delivery of ballots in the mail.”
Read more Trump’s ‘try again’ legal strategy has experts sounding the alarm
All of this began under Trump’s first term, according to Taylor, who writes, “I dealt with this in the first Trump administration, when the White House sent us on a foolish odyssey at DHS to expose this (non-existent) nationwide voter fraud conspiracy it keeps talking about. There wasn’t any evidence of such a conspiracy. It was tin-foil hat stuff. But I realize now the point was never to find the fraud. The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose. That’s what they’re doing now.”
He notes that thousands of DHS agents and federal prosecutors have been reassigned from their actual responsibilities and directed to help the president “seize control over who is allowed to cast a ballot.” For example, “the Trump administration continues to assert that all of its efforts are focused on the phantom menace of ‘noncitizen voters.’ But the pretext is collapsing under its own weight. Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claim they’ve found roughly 278,000 noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote in the United States. But when Nevada pressed the department on Mullin’s claim of 16,000 in their state, DHS admitted it had confirmed just 185, then refused to hand over the names so the state could investigate.”
According to Taylor, “Nothing in American history looks like this. At all. Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism.”
Read more Vulnerable Republican scrambling to get as far away from Trump as possible
