USA Today ""You can't eradicate an intelligence or law enforcement or security agency and then just stand it up again immediately," Becker said. "It takes years to build expertise. It takes years to train agents. And it takes far less time to tear that all down.””
President Trump and his friends have been talking about a third term. So take his actions on elections seriously.
Chris Brennan
Among the government institutions that President Donald Trump hopes to demolish during his second term, the agencies and task forces that protect American elections are the most predictable targets.
Trump simply cannot tolerate accuracy in our elections. He lies about voter fraud, whether he wins or loses. He dismisses the dangers of foreign interference, even as he invites it.
His malign machinations in the first three weeks of his second presidency are a callback to his notorious "Russia, if you're listening ..." plea in 2016, when he called on that country to help him win his first presidential election.
Limited now by the U.S. Constitution to two terms, Trump is also openly musing about running for a third term anyway, while rejecting the notion that his vice president might be his successor in office. And a Trump ally in the U.S. House last month introduced a proposed change to the Constitution to allow a third term.
If Trump really wants a third term, the billionaires who backed him last year will need to spend plenty again. And some foreign actors could help by waging another influence campaign on his behalf.
Is that why Trump is tearing down institutions that regulate money in elections and protect our votes from foreign influence? We've all seen him court billionaires, handing guys like Elon Musk the keys to the government. We've all heard him use the media to ask foreign governments for back-channel election assistance.
My rule on coincidences in politics ‒ I don't believe in them.
Trump wants to fire FEC commissioner. She's not going quietly.
Ellen Weintraub has been a commissioner on the U.S. Federal Election Commission for 23 years and was selected as chair for this year. She has been outspoken about the disproportionate influence of billionaires in elections and the need to guard against foreign influence. So of course Trump tried to fire her last week.Weintraub's not going quietly, and she has been public about examining legal options to resist Trump.
The FEC chair told me that someone would have to nominate her replacement, who would need to be confirmed by the Senate. Trump could have done that in his first term but didn’t.
Trump expects Supreme Court to give him a free pass.Weintraub didn't want to guess at Trump's motives, but she has been a critic of his actions and a lack of action by the FEC when concerns were raised about him, his political action committees and his family members.
She told me that of 63 allegations the FEC has received about Team Trump, the nonpartisan staff found reason to look at potential violations in 31 cases, but that none of the Republican commissioners allowed this to go forward."I do think I push a lot of buttons for them," Weintraub said of Trump and his billionaire political patrons.
She also issued a sharply worded rebuke in 2019 when Trump, during his first term, said in an ABC News interview that he would accept information on potential 2020 political rivals from foreign adversaries like Russia or China. Weintraub noted on social media that such an act would be illegal, adding, "I would not have thought that I needed to say this.”
Trump disbanded task force that monitored 'bad guys’
John Vaudreuil, who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin, said newly installed Attorney General Pam Bondi's decision to disband the Department of Justice's Foreign Influence Task Force last week during her first day on the job will have "immediate and long-lasting" consequences.
Vaudreuil, who now works with Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan group focused on civic education and election protection, offered this warning: "I can assure you that the bad guys, whether they're Russians or wherever they're from, who want to influence our elections or get involved in our economy, they're very organized. And as I would always say to my law enforcement partners, shame on us if we're not as organized as the bad guys.”
Among the tasks of the Foreign Influence Task Force, set up by the FBI during Trump's first term, was to combat efforts from overseas adversaries to "suppress voting and provide illegal campaign financing." That's according to an archived web page for the task force, since the DOJ took down the original version.
What's the echo I hear? "Russia, if you're listening ..."Trump weakening effort to fight election misinformation
David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who founded The Center for Election Innovation and Research, told me that we should also be concerned about Trump's efforts to push out of the government employees at The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who monitor election-targeted misinformation.
"We've seen foreign adversaries, particularly China, Russia and Iran, continually attempt to influence our elections, to deceive American voters, to probe election infrastructure," said Becker, who added that the Trump administration has "unilaterally disarmed" in that international struggle. "I'm sure leaders in Moscow and Tehran and Beijing are celebrating."You might be thinking ‒ Trump will do this sort of damage to the government but then someone new will be president in January 2029, if he follows the constitutional ban on a third term.
That's a big if, as we see federal court after federal court issue "you can't do that" rulings about early Trump actions that he and his team just shrug off.
And don't think four years of damage can be fixed in one or even four years by the next president.
"You can't eradicate an intelligence or law enforcement or security agency and then just stand it up again immediately," Becker said. "It takes years to build expertise. It takes years to train agents. And it takes far less time to tear that all down.”
Maybe Trump wants a third term. Maybe he can't stand the idea of government employees doing the legitimate work of government. Maybe he just revels in the notoriety born of burning down institutions.
One thing is certain ‒ if he gets his way, America will spend more than four years repairing his damage.