ELECTION INTEGRITYInside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections
In late 2020, Attorney General William Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demand that they support his brazen lies about the fiction of a stolen elections. Ultimately the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely. But if faced with the same tests today, the guardrails and people that held the line would largely be missing, an examination by ProPublica found.
Reporting Highlights
● Safeguards Destroyed: In advance of this year’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished federal guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 election.
● Changing of Guard: At least 75 career staff are gone. Two dozen appointees, including many from the election denial movement, have been hired. Ten helped try to overturn the 2020 vote.
● Political Interference: Once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers, which they’ve already used to push forward unprecedented actions that critics say amount to partisan interference.
In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.
They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.
Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.
With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.
Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?
ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.
The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unraveled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.
Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job.
