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 staffers.”
Simultaneously, Trump has also sought to absolve officials of any wrongdoing in the wake of the 2020 election. Last year, Trump gave “full, complete and unconditional” pardons to a slate of people who had tried, and 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 for the right’s election deniers when she facilitated a security breach during a software update of her county’s election management system.
Peters was found guilty of four felonies, but Trump has been mounting a campaign in recent months to get her released, even going so far as to say he “pardoned” her, even though he has no power to do so given she was convicted on state charges.
Election Day Interference
While Trump has not announced specific plans to deploy troops to polling locations or seize voting machines, he and his administration have certainly been suggesting that such action is not off the table.
In January, Trump lamented not having the National Guard seize certain voting machines after the 2020 election. In early February, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that while she hasn’t specifically heard Trump discussing the possibility, she couldn’t “guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November.” (The question was in response to former White House adviser Steve Bannon stating: “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again … We will never again allow an election to be stolen.”)
Earlier this month, during his confirmation hearing to head up the Department of Homeland Security, Senator Markwayne Mullin said he would be willing to deploy ICE to polling locations to address “a specific threat.”
The result of the Trump administration’s drip feed of threats and dog whistles is that those who are running elections in states across the country are already war-gaming what happens if ICE or the National Guard show up at their voting locations.
Michael McNulty, the policy director at Issue One, a nonprofit that tracks the impact of money in politics, also points to the fact that the Department of Justice sent monitors to oversee elections in November in New Jersey and California, despite no federal elections being held. “The concern is that this could become a massive deployment of, quote unquote, observers by the DOJ in 2026 who might do something more, whether it’s intimidation, whether it’s interfering with local election officials, to get data to confirm conspiracy theories,” McNulty tells WIRED.
FBI Raids
On January 28, the FBI raided the election office in Fulton County, Georgia, executing a search warrant that allowed it to seize ballots, ballot images, tabulator tapes, and the 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 to investigate election security in October 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 investigated conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
The raid was also notable for the presence of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who is, according to The Guardian, running a parallel investigation into the 2020 election with the apparent tacit approval of Trump.
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