https://thedispatch.com/
~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
In 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Congressman John Holmes that the Missouri Compromise over slavery was “a fire bell in the night” that “awakened and filled” the former president “with terror” as he “considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”
I am no Thomas Jefferson. But last month’s federal seizure of 2020 voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard personally present for the execution of the search warrant, filled me with a similar foreboding.
The 2020 presidential election was litigated in more than 60 court cases. Biden won. There is no evidence of foreign interference with vote counting in 2020, nor of any criminal conspiracy. Even if there had been a conspiracy, such misconduct would now lie outside the statute of limitations under federal criminal law. The clock cannot be rewound to elect Donald Trump president in 2020.
It was appropriate for the intelligence community (IC) to analyze its reporting on Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election and publicize its findings. But the KGB’s successors did not manipulate vote counts. Trump won in 2016 fair and square, as much as Biden did in 2020, and as much as Trump won again in 2024.
Gabbard and Deputy FBI Director Andrew Bailey’s personal presence during the service of a warrant to seize Georgia voter records was both unprecedented and extraordinary. The day the warrant was executed, President Trump republished a post improbably claiming that Italian military space satellites somehow manipulated American voting tabulation machines in 2020. Asked about the rationale for Gabbard’s visit to Georgia, a senior administration official said: “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure.” None of this makes good sense.
The National Security Act of 1947, which established the Central Intelligence Agency, declared that the agency “shall have no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions”—an amendment that was required to get the bill through a reluctant Congress. The entire intelligence community is prohibited from collecting information on U.S. persons solely to monitor First Amendment-protected activity—such as voting. The executive order on U.S. intelligence activities, issued by Ronald Reagan and updated by George W. Bush, prohibits IC elements (other than the FBI) from “acquiring information concerning the domestic activities” of U.S. persons. Simply put, absent narrow exceptions related to serious crimes such as espionage or terrorism, the IC is forbidden to spy on its fellow Americans.
The DNI's basic responsibility is to provide the president, department and agency heads, senior military commanders, and Congress with intelligence that is “objective” and “independent of political considerations.” Gabbard’s only authority related to voting is her supervision of the Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), which houses the Election Threat Executive (ETE). The ETE, founded in 2019, is tasked with providing recommendations for potential responses to attempts to influence or interfere with U.S. elections by countries such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
It is unclear how the DNI helping the FBI seize a county’s voting records from 2020 fits into the mission of the FMIC or the Office of the DNI (ODNI) more broadly, especially as those records were already under seal, per a state court order.
Also worrisome is ODNI’s involvement in the Interagency Weaponization Working Group (IWWG), until recently led by former interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, whose nomination to that post failed to even clear the Republican-led Senate judiciary committee. Martin’s brief tenure at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. featured a purge of experienced prosecutors who worked on cases related to January 6, 2021.
Martin spent his career in Missouri state politics. It is not likely coincidental that the current criminal investigation into the 2020 election is being run by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri, led by Republican former assistant state attorney general Thomas Albus, nor that the deputy FBI director, a post traditionally occupied by a career bureau agent, is Andrew Bailey, a former Missouri state AG with no federal law enforcement experience. It was Albus who requested the warrant, which cited alleged crimes involving voter registration and the retention of voting records.
In his time as IWWG head, Martin met with Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who lost a nearly $1 billion defamation lawsuit to the parents of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre victims, and who was also a prominent figure in the 2020 Stop the Steal movement.
Martin celebrated the seizure of Atlanta’s voting information by posting a picture of himself with Sidney Powell, a member of Trump’s legal team in 2020 who pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy to intentionally interfere with the performance of duties related to the 2020 election. (Trump later pardoned her.) Powell featured in a November 19, 2020, press conference in which she claimed that antifa, deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, China, Cuba, the Clinton Foundation, and billionaire George Soros conspired with Dominion Voting Systems to falsify election results. (Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million in damages for republishing similar allegations.) Powell, along with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, also advocated for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law to empower the military to seize voting machines in 2020, a suggestion the president recently said he regretted not taking.
Even CIA officers are involved in the IWWG, in violation of the prohibition on the agency having any internal security functions. The CIA narrowly survived being disestablished in the mid-1970s after it was revealed that the agency spied on civil rights and Vietnam War protests in an unsuccessful attempt to prove that these movements were catspaws of the KGB. The agency would certainly not have survived if Director Richard Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters had acceded to the Nixon administration’s illegal requests that they obstruct justice and falsely cite national security to deflect the FBI from investigating the Watergate break-in. As it was, President Gerald Ford spent enormous political capital defending the CIA from Congress’ Church and Pike committee investigations. In the first decade of this century, revelations of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation methods and the National Security Agency’s expanded signals intelligence collection programs after 9/11 yet again caused bipartisan congressional concern.
Gabbard, a reserve lieutenant colonel, had a commendable war record in Iraq, but her subsequent public service has been marred by her indulgence of conspiracy theories that, wittingly or not, advanced the interests of Russia and the former Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. She also lacked any previous experience with intelligence work. During her confirmation hearing, she refused to denounce turncoat Edward Snowden, an intelligence contractor who defected to Moscow with top secrets, as a “traitor.” (Gabbard was correct, legally speaking, only because the U.S. is not at war with Russia.) Gabbard cleared the Senate Intelligence Committee on a party-line 9-8 vote, and was confirmed on a 52-48 vote, with former GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell joining the Democrats. In contrast, the Senate unanimously confirmed previous nominees to her post such as Adms. Michael McConnell and Dennis Blair and Lt. Gen. James Clapper.
Gabbard’s judgment regarding conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election seems suspect at best. The IC is playing with fire if it allows Gabbard to drag it into a dubious investigation led by Republican politicians and begun by Martin (who has since been removed from the IWWG for accumulated missteps, including improper and failed prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York state Attorney General Letitia James), who in turn is influenced by conspiracy theorists Jones and Powell. America will always need foreign intelligence services, but they will not exist in their present form if the community follows its director down the rabbit hole of 2020 election denialism. And God forbid the country is attacked by surprise as at Pearl Harbor while the IC is looking inward and backward at 2020, instead out outward and forward at foreign threats.
The biggest threat here is not to intelligence agencies as institutions, however, but to the republic.
On January 21, speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump claimed that “everybody now knows that” the 2020 election was rigged and that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.” On January 28, Trump posted that Barack Obama is guilty of treason and reposted a demand that the former president be arrested now. The ill-advised Supreme Court decision that established presidential immunity for official acts (unless preceded by impeachment, conviction, and removal) would, of course, protect Obama from prosecution just as it prevented Trump from being prosecuted for January 6. On February 2 and 3, Trump demanded that the federal government “nationalize” and that Republicans “take over” elections, in contravention of the Constitution.
Trump’s posts demonstrate the state of his mind and that of his administration. Last month alone, the Justice Department launched seemingly retaliatory criminal probes into six sitting senators and representatives, as well as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, searched the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, and arrested former CNN journalist Don Lemon. The Department of Homeland Security gunned down demonstrators in separate incidents in Minneapolis, on camera and in broad daylight. DHS and the White House slandered the victims as domestic terrorists, falsely claimed that their officers wield “absolute immunity,” initially refused to investigate the killings, and continue to block state and local probes. As protests grew, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a remarkable intervention into domestic affairs, tweeted, “Thank God for the patriots of @ICEgov — we have your back 100%. You are SAVING the country. Shame on the leadership of Minnesota — and the lunatics in the street. ICE > MN.”
I am proud to have served as a human intelligence case officer in the Army and CIA, but I know that the IC makes mistakes and sometimes even breaks the law; I am presently litigating cases for former officials against the ODNI, CIA, and IWWG. It is bad enough that federal law enforcement is now being misused for partisan ends. In this environment, the intelligence community involving itself in 2020 election disputes threatens to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Intelligence agencies are powerful tools and do great things for our country. They are technologically advanced, filled with highly capable personnel, opaque to and often misunderstood by the public—and are feared by civil libertarians on the left and right for those reasons. Given the intense partisan divide at present and the irresponsibility of some actors involved here, the IC seeming to influence or even somehow interfere to prevent the midterm elections could ignite widespread civil unrest and political violence. Only the involvement of the military pursuant to the Insurrection Act could be worse.
The January 31 opinion of U.S. District Judge Fred Biery granting writs of habeas corpus to 5-year-old Minnesotan Liam Conejo Ramos and his father cited Thomas Jefferson’s bill of particulars against George III in the Declaration of Independence. Biery specifically cited Jefferson’s complaints about the British Army ignoring American civilian authority and abusing colonists’ rights. The Founding Fathers would certainly look askance at the intelligence community inappropriately inserting itself into the bedrock of the United States’ democracy, the resolution of her free and fair elections.
Congress, the inspectors general of the IC and its subordinate agencies, state attorneys general, city and county law departments, public interest groups, academia and think tanks, the bar and the press—in short, civil society—have a responsibility to act now, and with urgency, to investigate and prevent further illegal activities by the intelligence community related to elections. Former President Jefferson concluded his letter to Congressman Holmes by lamenting that he feared “the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.” Let us do our best to prove Jefferson wrong.
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