Defending the Vote: The Blanche Bullhorn Warning that the Midterms are Now at RiskTrump administration officials are laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the upcoming November elections.
Readers: This article is the first in a series of reports from “The Jim Acosta Show” on threats to democracy, including the upcoming midterms. We are calling this initiative, “Defending the Vote.” The Acting Attorney General just said the riot part out loud.
“There’s a ton of evidence that the election was rigged,” Trump defense attorney turned acting A.G. Todd Blanche told Fox Business propagandist Maria Bartiromo, who continues to platform election lies on her show. “They’re very good at hiding up their misconduct. Hiding what they’re doing. And so that’s why we are very focused on finding out whether the right people voted,” Blanche said, repeatedly lying about the 2020 results in such battleground states as Arizona and Georgia. Of course, Blanche is neglecting to mention that the first Trump administration was in office during the 2020 election. One of Blanche’s predecessors under Trump, Attorney General William Barr had his own department investigate these ridiculous claims and later said there was no evidence of any widespread voter fraud. "To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election," Barr said at the time. Barr on 2020 election Trump’s cybersecurity director at the time, Christopher Krebs also vouched for the credibility of the election, releasing a statement, declaring “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised." Krebs was fired after releasing that statement. Based on my conversations with numerous sources close to the president, I reported in late 2020 that Trump knew he had been defeated, but simply “lost it,” as one of those associates explained to me. What unfolded over the following weeks was the closest this nation had ever come to a coup, an operation led by the president himself and many of his closest aides. That undemocratic assault on U.S. elections, of course, culminated in the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. I was with Trump at Joint Base Andrews and on Air Force One as part of the press pool, on the day he left office two weeks later. It was the most disgraceful exit ever for any U.S. president.
Blanche, who is auditioning for the permanent job of Attorney General, knows all too well there is a price for telling the truth about 2020. Trump will just pick another stooge who will lie on his behalf. So far this year, the Justice Department has sent agents to Georgia and Arizona in search of anything resembling an irregularity for the purposes of somehow proving that Trump and his 2020 election lies were right all along. It is remarkable that Trump never brings up the 2024 campaign which somehow went off without a hitch despite having virtually the same officials running elections in essentially the same battleground states four years later. That’s because Trump’s anti-democracy racket has nothing to do with ferreting out voter fraud, something he has been trying to do since the 2016 election when he sulked over his popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton. He blamed that on undocumented immigrant voters, another stubborn Trump election lie, and appointed then-Vice President Mike Pence to a voter fraud task force that failed to prove anything of the sort. Trump has two chief goals in mind with his ballot baloney. The first is to coax his party to disenfranchise minorities on a massive scale. He has complained time and again that election results cannot be trusted in cities run by black and latino leaders. During his interview on Fox Business Sunday, Blanche stated the administration’s goal of making sure only the “right voters” are able to cast ballots - a clear dog whisle. But it is Trump who has been the voting fraudster all along. In recent weeks, he and his political team have worked hand in glove with state legislators in the deep-red MAGA south to resurrect Jim Crow-style congressional maps that seek to eliminate minority representation in Congress. MAGA-loyalist justices on the Supreme Court and other sympathetic state judges are lending Trump a hand in his midterm meddling. When Democrats tried to respond to Trump‘s redistricting gambit in Texas by doing the same in Virginia, the commonwealth’s Supreme Court sided with the autocratic president delivering a ruling that essentially says, “new maps for me but not for thee.” As many as 19 members of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats as a result of Trump’s attack on minority districts, according to the CBC. CBC to be decimated? Trump’s second goal, of course, is to start building a case to challenge the midterm election results in the almost certain event that Democrats take control of the House and, quite possibly, the Senate. Part of this task involves sending almost daily messages to his army of election deniers. Witness his pressure campaign on the Democratic governor of Colorado to commute the sentence of Tina Peters, who just won her fight to be released from prison, despite being convicted of giving some 2020 deniers access to her county’s election system. Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert suggested that Trump was blocking funds for a state water project in order to secure Peters’ release. Pressure to Release Peters Also consider the news that Trump might settle his bogus lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service with a potential agreement that would create a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for January 6th rioters and insurrectionists, as well as other Trump attack dogs who claim they were wrongfully prosecuted by the government, since the assault on the Capitol. Such a move would, for all intents and purposes, finance a Trump goon squad that could “stand back and stand by,” as the president once said of the Proud Boys, just in case he wants to incite a violent attack on another election. Trump Slush Fund for Rioters, Insurrectionists Now is the moment to put pro-democracy Americans on high alert. Blanche’s comments on Fox Business amount to an announcement by bullhorn that our votes are once again at risk. Make no mistake, the president of the United States will stop at nothing to thwart the will of the people. Elected officials at the local, state and federal level should be roused to the threat at hand - an authoritarian assault on our upcoming midterms, all in pursuit of a government of Trump, by Trump, and for Trump. You're currently a free subscriber to The Jim Acosta Show. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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