The White House refused to rule out following through on a call for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents to “surround the polls” when voters cast ballots in this November’s midterm elections as a way of depressing Democratic turnout and boosting chances of a Republican victory this fall.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday said she could offer “no guarantee” that ICE personnel would not be stationed at polling sites when Americans are in the process of choosing whether to extend the Republican stranglehold on power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
She had been asked about former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s recent call for Trump to deploy ICE around election sites on his War Room podcast on Tuesday, just days after Trump himself called for a Republican “takeover” of vote-counting in Democratic-led states and municipalities.
Bannon had endorsed Trump’s suggestion that his party seize control of voting machinery and counting, telling listeners: “You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.”
When pressed on whether Trump was considering heeding Bannon’s advice, Leavitt demurred, telling reporters that the idea of putting ICE at polling sites wasn’t something she’d “ever heard the president consider.”
But when asked to pledge that Trump would keep immigration agents away from voting, she said “can’t guarantee that an ice agent won’t be around a polling location in November” and called the matter “a very silly hypothetical question” and “disingenuous” while stating that she hadn’t heard Trump “discuss any formal plans.”
Leavitt’s comments came just a week after FBI agents — accompanied by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — executed a search warrant at Fulton County, Georgia election facilities and seized ballots and other materials from the election Trump lost to his successor turned predecessor Joe Biden in November 2020.
Gabbard’s presence at the search has alarmed Democrats and legal experts who have pointed out that the former Hawaii congresswoman’s current position gives her no authority to conduct domestic law enforcement tasks or be present for a search of an American election facility.
Trump himself has been fixated on Fulton County since record-high Black turnout in 2020 made him the first Republican to lose the Peach State since former president George HW Bush lost to Bill Clinton there in the 1992 presidential election.
Gabbard reportedly used her mobile phone to set up a call between Trump and the agents searching the location, and Trump himself said last week that the DNI had been there “working very hard on trying to keep the election safe.”
She said in a letter released last week that her presence in Atlanta had been “requested by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security,” but her account was contradicted by Trump during a speech Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast in which he said Gabbard had gone there at the request of Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Pressed to explain the contradiction, Leavitt did not answer directly but instead claimed that Gabbard had been there “to make sure that American elections are free of foreign interference and safe and secure.”
“It’s the media who has said there’s Russian interference in American elections … you should all be very happy that we finally have an administration that is looking into that,” she said.
Both the Department of Justice and the Senate Intelligence Committee — which was led at the time by Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was a senator from Florida — have reported extensively on what a report by former FBI Director Robert Mueller called a “sweeping and systematic” campaign by the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf by a variety of means.
But Leavitt did not explain what, if any foreign interference had allegedly taken place in the 2020 race.
A trio of recounts by Georgia officials have each confirmed that Biden won the Peach State’s electoral votes that year. But Trump continues to insist he won despite no evidence to support his claims.
Source: independent.co.uk