Leading GOP Election Officials: Feds’ ‘Treasonous’ Interference Is A ‘Direct Attack’ On U.S. Elections
Several leading Republican election officials are sounding the alarm about the federal government’s persistent interference in U.S. elections.
Jay Ashcroft and Mac Warner, the secretaries of state of Missouri and West Virginia, respectively, recently told The Federalist they are increasingly worried about the mounting evidence documenting federal agencies’ interference in prior elections to the benefit of the Democrat Party.
Ashcroft pointed to the long-awaited report from U.S. Attorney John Durham that confirmed what The Federalist has been reporting for years: The FBI possessed no real evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with Russian government officials when it launched its investigation into the Trump campaign leading up to the 2016 election.
The political investigation — which was “based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” — would continue throughout the 2016 election and well into Trump’s presidency.
This type of behavior from government agencies “is what you expect out of a banana republic,” Ashcroft said. “It is a direct attack on a foundational aspect of our country, that being fair, free elections.” As it turns out, he noted, “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 echoed similar sentiments, calling the report’s findings “extraordinary” and adding that he can’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 2016 election wasn’t the only one in which U.S. intel agencies decided to intervene to boost Democrats’ electoral prospects. Last month, a report released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government indicated the 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 letter — which was signed by more than 50 former intel officials — was used as a pretext by Big Tech companies and legacy media to censor and ignore the New York Post’s reporting on the Bidens’ shady business dealings ahead of the 2020 election.
During his Oct. 2020 debate with Trump, Biden even cited the letter to dismiss Trump’s mention of the Post report, accusing the then-Republican president of partaking in a “Russian plan.” It’s also worth noting that during an August interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Facebook algorithmically suppressed stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election after being primed to do so by the FBI. According to Zuckerberg, the FBI warned Facebook about forthcoming “Russian propaganda” just before reports of the laptop dropped.
Polls taken since the 2020 election have shown that the coordinated efforts between U.S. intelligence agencies, America’s regime media, and social media companies to censor and ignore the Post’s reporting may have tipped the election to Biden. As Federalist CEO Sean Davis reported, 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.”
In his remarks to The Federalist, Warner took specific aim at then-Biden campaign adviser and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who, according to testimony from ex-CIA official Michael Morell, played a role in the creation of the debunked letter. During his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Morell said Blinken reached out to him to discuss the laptop story several days after it dropped and that the call “absolutely” pushed him to write the infamous letter. Morell additionally confirmed one of the main reasons he released the letter was because he “wanted [Biden] to win the election.”
“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.”
Warner has been among several Republican elected officials to call for Blinken’s resignation.
While discussing the integrity of future elections, Ashcroft and Warner both emphasized that failure to hold America’s intel agencies accountable for their previous shenanigans will only result in continued interference in future elections.
“Unless there is real punishment for the people involved, it will continue in future elections,” Ashcroft said. “They are violating federal law by being involved in elections in a political way that they are not allowed to be and they are using that to change the outcome. They are using … not just their office, but their clearance and their job titles, and using that to change the outcome of our elections. I don’t know what’s more severe than that.”
It’s worth mentioning that Missouri and West Virginia have implemented several election integrity reforms in recent years. Last year, Missouri passed legislation requiring voters to “provide a form of personal photo identification that is consistent” with state law in order to vote. Meanwhile, West Virginia, according to Warner, has successfully removed more than 400,000 ineligible voters from its voter registration lists since 2016. Both states were also among those to withdraw from ERIC — a leftist-controlled voter-roll management group — earlier this year.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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