When you put clowns in charge of elections, expect a sinister circus. Via the New York Times:
Election officials from nearly all 50 states gathered on a call last month with the Homeland Security Department’s point person on “election integrity,” eager to hear how the woman filling a newly created Trump administration position might help safeguard the vote ahead of next year’s midterms.
But many of them left alarmed.
Rather than offering assurances that the federal government’s election protection programs would continue uninterrupted, the new official, Heather Honey, instead used portions of the meeting to echo rhetoric that has infused the right-wing election activist movement that emerged since President Trump falsely claimed that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud, according to five people with knowledge of the call.
Ms. Honey, a leader in that movement until her appointment in August as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, complained that her department’s cybersecurity experts tasked with combating misinformation about elections had “strayed from their mission.”
The remark echoed a widespread view on the right that the agency had sought to silence supporters of Mr. Trump’s fraud claims. Ms. Honey also repeatedly mentioned a report often cited by election conspiracists to support their claims that voting machines were rigged to favor Democrats, according to the people familiar with the call.
The ascent of Ms. Honey reflects how Mr. Trump and his allies, despite a clear victory last year, remain consumed with the belief that the 2020 election was stolen — and how the president is using the powers of the government to upend an electoral system that he insists helped Joseph R. Biden Jr. take the White House.
He doesn’t actually believe that. It’s just a cover story to give him an excuse to turn what’s left of America into a banana republic. Trump is knocking down any potential source of pushback by flooding the ranks with henchmen and cranks who will gladly do his bidding.
On a call with right-wing activists in March, before her appointment to the Homeland Security Department, Ms. Honey suggested that the new administration could declare a “national emergency” and justify dictating new rules to state and local governments. She said this could be based on an “actual investigation” of the 2020 election if it showed there had been a “manipulation” of the vote.
“National emergency.” Uh huh. It’s going to be a hellish couple of years. Get ready.
