National Security Officials: GQP Election Subversion Is A National Security Threat

The Department of Homeland Security issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin. Key highlight:

Through the remainder of 2021 and into 2022, domestic violent extremists (DVEs), including racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists and anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists, will continue to pose a significant threat to our homeland.

The Hill reports, Former top officials warn democracy in ‘jeopardy’ without Congressional action on election security:

A bipartisan group of almost 100 former national security officials is urging Congress to take steps to secure elections ahead of next year, warning that without action, the nation’s democratic institutions are in “severe jeopardy.”

“We write to express our alarm at ongoing efforts to destabilize and subvert our elections, both through active disinformation campaigns and the related efforts to inject partisan interference into our professionally administered election process,” the officials wrote in an open letterpublished Tuesday. “We believe these efforts are profoundly damaging to our national security, including by making our elections more vulnerable to foreign interference and possible manipulation.”

“We call on Congress to confront these threats and safeguard our democratic process as we look ahead to the 2022 elections and beyond,” they wrote.

Signatories of the letter included former officials who worked for administrations on both sides of the aisle, including former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former DHS SecretaryJanet Napolitano, former Defense Secretary William Cohen and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

They also included former ambassadors, top officials at the CIA and former top cybersecurity officials, including former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Christopher Krebs and Michael Daniel, the former White House cybersecurity coordinator under President Obama.

The former officials cited specific concerns arising from the 2020 presidential election. They pointed to an “unprecedented, coordinated effort to cast doubt on the U.S. election system” in the months following the election, which saw states such as Arizona conduct strenuous audits to check the accuracy of the results.

“The rampant spread of election disinformation and the efforts to undermine confidence in the democratic process jeopardize our national security in a number of dangerous ways,” the former officials wrote.

Following the presidential election, many election officials throughout the country were threatened, and the election results were questioned by former President Trump and some of his supporters. The officials pointed to the Jan. 6 [insurrection], which occurred the day Congress was certifying the presidential election results, in underlining the dangerous impacts of the spread of election disinformation.

See Reuters, Reuters unmasks Trump supporters who terrified U.S. election officials: After Reuters reported the widespread intimidation in June, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a task force to investigate threats against election staff and said it would aggressively pursue such cases. But law enforcement agencies have made almost no arrests and won no convictions.

“While this year’s disinformation campaigns cannot change the outcome of the 2020 election, they will fuel future calls to overturn election results,” the former officials warned. “And if such a call were successful, the ensuing chaos, uncertainty, and potential violence could be exploited by foreign actors and leave us unprepared for a future attack.”

In order to beef up election security and ensure greater voter confidence, the officials recommended that Congress push for use of voter-verifiable paper ballots in elections, that stronger physical protections for election equipment and ballots be put in place and that the federal government respond to threats against election workers.

Many of these recommendations are included in bills that Democrats have tried to push through Congress over the past year, particularly following efforts in Republican-led states to overhaul election procedures, but Republicans have largely blocked these bills on Capitol Hill.

“If this playbook of undermining and subverting our elections is left unchecked, the campaigns to do so will become increasingly more sophisticated and difficult to rebuff, making it increasingly likely that a majority of Americans will no longer trust election results,” the officials wrote.

The former officials warned that time is of the essence in taking action to improve election security.

“In the course of our careers, many of us have analyzed the threats posed by unstable democracies elsewhere, never imagining we would begin to see similar threats at home. Sadly, that moment has arrived,” the wrote. “We have strong democratic institutions and traditions, but they are being placed in severe jeopardy in the current climate. We call on you to meet this challenge squarely and put in place the defenses that will safeguard the integrity of our sacred democratic institutions.”

James Clapper and Michael Hayden write at the Washington Post, We must protect our elections now. National security is at stake.

By now, it is well documented that in 2020 a sitting president and his allies tried to overturn the results of an election, triggering the worst political violence this country has seen in living memory. It is also clear that this attempt to undermine our democracy did not end with the transition to a new president, but continues with active efforts to make sure the next sabotage succeeds where the last one failed. What is less widely understood — and what keeps us up at night — is how great a threat these activities pose to our national security.

This looming crisis is why we, along with nearly 100 other former national security and military officials, issued a statement urging Congress to prioritize protecting election integrity. We both served at the highest levels of our country’s intelligence community, under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, and we know that our foreign adversaries and other bad actors are licking their chops as they watch efforts to destabilize our elections.

At the heart of the attack is a homegrown disinformation campaign meant to sow doubt in the U.S. voting system. Unfortunately, it is working — poll after poll shows declining trust in our elections and declining belief in the concept of democracy, particularly among Republicans. And these effects will not be contained to our borders.

We have personally seen the lengths to which our foreign adversaries will go to take advantage of any cracks in the foundation of our democracy. One of us was director of national intelligence during the period leading up to the 2016 presidential vote and saw firsthand how Russia used social media to exploit disinformation, polarization and divisiveness. The Russians’ objective was to breed discord, and they succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Now others have gone to school on the Russian example and will seek to prey on our country’s state of affairs in just the same way.

Unfortunately, adversaries are finding increasingly fertile ground for their efforts. A society struggling to separate fact from fiction is the perfect environment for these actors to further erode electoral trust and kick democracy into a death spiral. They might also seek to take advantage of the exposure of sensitive information about election equipment or voter data that resulted from recent hyper-partisan election “reviews” such as Arizona’s [“Fraudit”], as well as the inevitable decline in security that will accompany the mass exodus of expert election officials facing violent threats. And if disinformation leads to more political violence like we saw on Jan. 6 — as seems increasingly likely — you can bet the house that enemies abroad will be ready to seize on the resulting chaos.

There are also serious foreign policy consequences to this crisis. The United States’ power since World War II has come not just from our military might but also from the political stability and economic prosperity a thriving democracy provides. America stood as a model and inspiration for other countries, exercising the kind of soft power that drives diplomacy and encourages the spread of democracy around the world. But the once-high regard for American democracy is in steep decline, and with it America’s global influence and moral authority.

While the situation is dire, it is far from hopeless. There are clear and simple steps the Biden administration and Congress must take now to harden our defenses against the risk posed by election destabilization.

To its credit, the administration recognizes that preserving our democracy is a national security imperative. It is convening a Summit for Democracy next month that should promote not just voting rights and election integrity but also executive branch accountability and civic education and engagement. For its part, the Justice Department should continue to seek accountability for the Jan. 6 attack, and must do more to prosecute those who unlawfully intimidate election officials. If we fail to hold these people accountable in the present, we invite similar efforts in the future.

Meanwhile, Congress must provide adequate funding to state and local governments to help them secure their election infrastructure against malicious foreign and domestic actors. Legislators should also immediately enact safeguards we know will make our federal elections more resilient, such as paper ballots to facilitate result verification in the event of a dispute or attempted sabotage. Other necessary measures include requirements for protecting ballots and election equipment, as well as election workers, and meaningful penalties for attempts to violate such laws or manipulate an election. Some of these proposals have already been introduced in Congress; there is no excuse to delay.

Three decades ago, the promise of American democracy helped us prevail in the Cold War. Today, our enemies can smell the weakness in our political system, and they will be ready to exploit it. We must be prepared to meet that threat — for our national security, for our democracy and for the future of our country.

As Jennifer Rubin recently wrote, Manchin has no more excuses. It’s time to fix the filibuster.

For 10 months, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) refused to consider alteration of the Senate’s filibuster rule for legislation to protect voting rights. He insists there are 10 reasonable Republicans who can agree on a reform package. Whether he actually believes that or merely seeks to avoid tough votes that would put him at odds with his state’s conservative voters is unknown.

Regardless, his assessment is dead wrong. If that wasn’t already clear, every Republican except Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) voted to block consideration of legislation reviving Sections 2 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act (both eviscerated by the right-wing Supreme Court).

[M]anchin cannot argue with a straight face that Republicans have reasonable objections to his own compromise efforts.

[E]qually critical to attempts to secure ballot access — if not more so — is passage of a package of reforms to defend the integrity of elections, preventing a replay of Jan. 6 and Republican efforts to overturn election results that don’t go their way. The need for national standards for post-election activities, including the handling of ballots to prevent future phony election “audits” as seen in Arizona, could not be higher. As former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, former House impeachment counsel Norman Eisen and Jessica Marsden, a counsel at Protect Democracy, write in a Newsweek op-ed:

The anti-election subversion legislation would also impose strong, enforceable federal penalties against those who would use threats and violence to try and stop the evenhanded administration of elections. Most importantly, they would establish a federal prohibition on the politically-motivated removal of election officials, as several proposed and enacted bills purport to allow.

These measures — along with additional common-sense reforms like requiring the use of paper ballots so that there is a verifiable record of the election results — are critical to protecting our elections and voter confidence. And they are popular, garnering overwhelming support from Americans across the political spectrum. . . . This is a critical component of the federal response to efforts to suppress and subvert the vote. It is time for Congress to do something about it.

Anti-election subversion legislation must also plug the holes in the Electoral Count Act, to ensure that a future GOP House majority cannot block a victorious Democratic presidential candidate from taking power.

As soon as their economic package passes, Senate Democrats and the White House must turn up the heat on Manchin, who (with a big assist from Democratic Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema) has bottled up President Biden’s agenda and contributed to the disaster in Virginia. Democrats have every reason to demand that Manchin not multiply the damage already done to his party and, worse, to the sanctity of elections, by continuing his defense of filibuster powers.

The time has arrived for Biden to level with Manchin: If he prevents Democrats from protecting our voting system, the 2022 and 2024 landscape for Democrats will be treacherous — and democracy itself will be imperiled. If they fail to shore up voting in the post-Jan. 6 era, the lion’s share of the blame will fall on Manchin for defending the same tool Southern segregationists deployed to fend off civil rights legislation. At a bare minimum, anti-election subversion legislation must succeed.

Democrats dare not enter the midterms with voting rights reform left undone. That means using every public and private means of persuasion, both carrots and sticks, to cajole Manchin. With Manchin’s utter failure to find 10 pro-democracy Republicans to fortify our democracy, he is in a particularly weak position to argue that the Senate works as it should.

Biden publicly said he would back a change in the filibuster rules if voting rights hang in the balance. That’s exactly where we are now. It’s time for Biden to prove his devotion goes beyond rhetoric.