Attorney General Todd Blanche; his predecessor, Pam Bondi; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; and Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division, have all avoided providing yes-or-no answers about the election in appearances before Congress. Instead, they have acknowledged only that President Joseph R.
Biden Jr.’s victory was legally certified. Emil Bove III, a former Blanche aide, offered a telling non-answer during his confirmation process for a federal judgeship last year: It was inappropriate to opine on 2020 because it was an unresolved “political or policy debate,” he wrote in a questionnaire. This refusal to acknowledge the fact that Mr.
Trump lost, a go-to tactic for nominees seeking to avoid contradicting the president, has become so commonplace it no longer warrants much attention. Yet it reflects the enduring legacy of a polarizing election whose reverberations are still being felt, perhaps most consequentially in the department’s presumption that voter fraud is so rampant that it requires a forceful federal response. That premise has been challenged by state election officials and expert analysis.
Brinson Bell said the administration’s current initiatives, like its attempt to curtail mail-in voting, the unsuccessful effort to obtain sensitive voter data from states and the issuance of threats against local officials, underscore themes Mr. Trump struck six years ago. The 2020 election “seems to have been something of a catalyst” for their current actions, she added.
Trump built a powerhouse political movement by mobilizing supporters to align with his grievances, including his debunked claims of a conspiracy to steal the election and his rage over being prosecuted for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. And the president has explicitly linked his stop-the-steal message six years ago to the midterm elections this year. He exploded after a federal court recently rejected the department’s demand that officials in California stop counting 20,000 mail-in ballots over concerns the batch included noncitizens who voted illegally, even though such instances are exceedingly rare.
Trump wrote on social media on Saturday as he continued to stew over the Supreme Court’s refusal to consider his efforts to overturn the 2020 results. Blanche, the president’s former defense lawyer, told Fox News that “there is a ton of evidence the election was rigged.” But he added that producing evidence that would hold up in court was “very difficult because they’re very good at hiding misconduct and hiding what they’re doing.” Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokeswoman, dismissed the idea that the department’s actions in California and its effort to pre-emptively contest the results of the Alaska’s Senate race were impelled by any lingering grievances over 2020, just the determination to enforce laws the Biden administration would not. Prosecuting those cases is not ‘interceding’ in state elections.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
