Several prominent Republican election officials warned about the federal government’s interference in U.S. elections.
Jay Ashcroft and Mac Warner, the secretaries of the state of Missouri and West Virginia, recently told The Federalist they are worried about increasing evidence documenting federal agencies’ interference in past elections benefiting the Democratic Party.
Leading GOP Election Officials: Feds’ ‘Treasonous’ Interference Is A ‘Direct Attack’ On U.S. Electionshttps://t.co/erspuu95C0
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) June 2, 2023
Ashcroft noted the recent report from U.S. Attorney John Durham that confirmed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had no verifiable evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump conspired with the Russian government when it launched an investigation into Trump before the 2016 election.
According to the Durham Report, the FBI’s investigation, which was “based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” would continue throughout the 2016 election and during former President Donald Trump’s tenure.
Ashcroft said the FBI’s behavior “is what you expect our of a banana republic.” “It is a direct attack on a foundational aspect of our country, that being fair, free elections,” he added.
Ashcroft noted that “the largest purveyor of misinformation and disinformation with regard to elections [over the course of] the last several years has been the federal government.”
Warner shared Ashcroft’s claims, calling the Durham Report’s findings “extraordinary,” adding that he couldn’t recall an instance in U.S. history where “our own federal agencies have gotten involved in an election to the point of lying to the American people to sway the outcome … for one candidate and one party.”
The Federalist reported that the 2016 election was not the only one where U.S. intelligence agencies decided to interfere with efforts to increase Democrats’ electoral prospects.
Recently, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report indicating that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “both solicited signatures for and eventually approved the infamous 2020 letter claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian disinformation plot.”
The 2020 letter, which 50 former intelligence officials signed, was used as a pretext by “Big Tech” companies and mainstream media to censor and bypass the New York Post’s reporting on the Biden family’s foreign business dealings ahead of the 2020 election.
Polls since the 2020 election have shown that the coordinated efforts between U.S. intelligence agencies, mainstream media, and social media companies to censor the New York Post’s reporting may have swung the election towards Biden.
A 2022 poll by TIPP Insights “found that 47 percent of those polled, including 45 percent of independents, said knowing the laptop contents were real and not Russian disinformation likely would have changed their votes in the 2020 election.”
Warner told The Federalist that then-campaign adviser and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken played a crucial role in creating the 2020 letter.
“Using the word treason is not out of context. It’s treasonous when you betray your own, and this [was] a betrayal by our own people,” Warner said.
“These agencies are supposed to protect us, and [yet] they are the ones who are perpetrating this fraud on the American people. You just can’t get any more insidious or dangerous than that,” he added.
