Even while claiming that it is preventing election interference, it is engaging in it.
By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine
In Ohio, US Attorney Rebecca Lutzko, a Biden nominee opposed by Republicans, announced the appointment of two federal prosecutors to serve as “election officers”.
In Utah, US Attorney Trina A. Higgins, a Democrat donor and Biden appointee, appointed a “district election officer” to stop any “interference or discrimination in voting” and “threats” against election officials.
Events in Ohio and Utah are part of a larger unprecedented level of Justice Department intervention in the 2024 presidential election in support of the administration’s party.
The DOJ recently sued Virginia and Alabama to ensure that non-citizens would not be removed from voting rolls before Election Day, but those are only a prelude to a more ambitious plan.
Shortly after taking power, the Biden-Harris administration created an Elections Threats Task Force to suppress any scrutiny or criticism of election officials.
According to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Elections Threats Task Force was launched in response to a “dangerous increase in violent threats against the public servants who administer our elections.”
And yet after 3 years of operating, the Task Force monitored 2,000 threats, opened 100 investigations and only convicted 18 people.
The vast majority of claims behind the supposed “dangerous increase” proved to be unsubstantiated, impossible to investigate, let alone charge.
Less than a percent of the basis for the Elections Threats Task Force had any substance at all.
Furthermore those 18 convictions included the case of a mentally unstable career criminal and Lyndon LaRouche supporter who allegedly shot at the residences of New Mexico officials and assorted threats of violence that included a woman sentenced to 30 days in jail and a man sentenced to 18 months of home detention which did not require a special task force.
The Election Threats Task Force includes the heads of the FBI, the DOJ’s Criminal Division and National Security Division and the Department of Homeland Security.
That’s a good deal more resources than are needed to cope with a few threats in which no one actually got hurt.
The most striking thing about the Election Threats Task Force was that with one exception, every conviction targeted perceived MAGA activists and candidates.
The one exception was a BLM activist’s attempt to assassinate the Democrat mayor of Louisville, Kentucky.
While the Biden-Harris Election Threats Task Force chased down every threat by a Republican that it could verify, the DOJ wilfully allowed threats against Republican officials to continue.
Rep. Jim Banks warned that the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana refused to prosecute threats to his family including a message warning, “three daughters. Hey, hey, hey, three bullets hey, hey, hey one wife yay. Oh yeah, yeah, we’ll give her two bullets.”
The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana is Clifford Darnell Johnson, a Biden appointee, who has announced the appointment of an election officer to stop political threats.
But the supposed threats were never the actual purpose of the Elections Threats Task Force.
All of this is leading up to the DOJ’s Election Day Program deploying FBI agents and DOJ officials nationwide and running a command center to “address events… related to the election in real time.” What sort of election events have to be addressed in real time?
A hotline will go live within a week and every field office will have two FBI agents tasked with responding to reports of local events.
First up on the FBI’s list of ‘election crimes’ is “voter suppression” which the Bureau defines as “deceiving qualified voters” by providing them with “false claims about voting qualifications or methods”.
The DOJ’s Election Threats Task Force warns that while AI “is not inherently criminal”, it’s a potential “disinformation” threat.
This is not about threats of violence, but about federal control of local elections.
The Department of Justice is directly intervening in local elections to monitor and respond to everything from memes to ‘qualified voters’ being prevented from voting.
And to quickly suppress any attempts to scrutinize and demand transparency during and after the election.
Attorney General Merrick Garland claimed that the “founding purpose” of the Justice Department was “protecting our democracy and protecting our elections”.
After failing to pass HR1 and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act to federalize elections, the Biden-Harris administration appears to be using the DOJ to influence local elections as much as possible.
The Grant administration founded the Justice Department to stop violence against Republicans by Democrat Party KKK thugs.
The last time voter intimidation of that kind happened was during Obama’s first presidential campaign when members of a black supremacist hate group wore uniforms, carried weapons and threatened white voters that “you’re about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.”
While the Justice Department brought charges under the Voting Rights Act, the Obama administration decided to give the racist thugs a pass for voter intimidation.
Tom Perez, Biden’s senior advisor, then serving as the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, was a key player in the Philly voter intimidation case and subsequent cover-up.
The Elections Threats Task Force and Election Day Program are not about fighting that actual kind of voter intimidation, but providing federal backup to partisan election officials against state and local officials, intimidating poll watchers and election integrity activists, suppressing political speech and working to ensure that the election outcome is the one sought by the administration.
The DOJ’s unprecedented election interference is based on inventing an imaginary threat which the Department, even with the support of the section heads and the administration, couldn’t even rack up a 1% conviction rate after years of investigations, and exploiting that crisis to closely insert federal forces into elections in a systematic way that threatens the Constitution.
The rapid growth of federal power has eroded the constitutional balance of state power.
The Justice Department has invented a crisis that does not exist to further sideline state authority and the integrity of locally controlled elections.
Even while claiming that it is preventing election interference, it is engaging in it.
The Elections Threats Task Force’s track record of partisan prosecutions does not inspire any confidence that its election intervention has any purpose other than to serve the partisan agenda of the administration calling the shots.
The DOJ is not the solution to election integrity, instead it is quickly emerging as the threat.