On Wednesday, a former member of President Donald Trump’s national security team claimed that the White House has a “Trojan Horse” for obscuring its “scheme” to meddle in the midterms. This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, at the time famously leaking the existence of a resistance group within the administration. Trump, says Taylor, is not only trying to steal the election, but is handing a “gift” to U.S. adversaries who seek to hack the voting system.
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Taylor was referring to bombshell reporting from Tuesday, in which a whistleblower from within USPS revealed that the Trump administration has the U.S. Postal Service developing a massive, questionable new system for verifying mail-in ballots. The system, it is alleged, has prompted alarm from agency officials and IT experts who worry that its creation and implementation have been rushed, and that it will ultimately fail. It was also suggested that Trump mandated that the new USPS procedures be concealed from the public, and that those procedures will make an already complicated and risky plan even more vulnerable to potential mass disenfranchisement. All of this follows Trump’s executive order that gave USPS an “unprecedented” role in overseeing states’ mail ballot programs.
As CNN explains, these allegations come “as multiple courts are considering the legality of the proposal, which would require that states submit to USPS lists of their mail-in voters. The agency will not deliver ballots for states if there are any discrepancies between the voter information in the USPS system and what’s picked up by agency scanners on the envelopes of the ballots.” According to the whistleblower’s report, “USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation — raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.”
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“When I was at DHS, we would’ve called Trump’s election scheme a ‘Trojan Horse,’” posted Taylor. “By tracking ballots in the mail, he could hypothetically cancel out votes. It’s also a gift to foreign bad guys, since it creates a central node for them to attack.”
Taylor also appeared on CNN on Tuesday night, where he revealed his conversations with the USPS whistleblower’s legal team, which informed him that the individual felt leaking was their only option as there was no “safe place” within the government to report their concerns. According to Taylor, this is important to note because it suggests that “the inspector generals and the channels normally we would expect someone to blow the whistle on lawlessness are not trusted anymore by individuals who think they’ve witnessed criminal conduct.”
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