Donald Trump Is Turning CISA Into The Embodiment Of His Election Conspiracy Theories
Donald Trump spent the four years between presidential terms complaining about a stolen" election. He - and his enablers - made multiple baseless claims about election fraud and claimed the entire system was rigged against him. His lawyers and supporters suggested voting machines were so insecure that the Venezuelan government itself might have been involved in his loss to Joe Biden.
These claims about a rigged system evaporated when Trump won the 2024 election. But he's not about to let the perceived slight of the 2020 election evaporate along with his insistence the electoral system is so deeply corrupt it would never let him ascend to the Oval Office again.
But he does know there's still plenty of performative hay to be made by re-stoking the fires of the stolen election" conspiracy. While he and his fellow shitheels do their best to dismantle pretty much every part of the federal government Trump doesn't like, elections are possibly on their way to being as insecure as Trump claimed they were before he urged his crowd of willing insurrectionists to raid the Capitol on January 6, 2020.
CISA (Cyber security and Infrastructure Security Agency) has been doing its best to thwart security threats and deter the spread of misinformation about government security. Trump apparently doesn't like that. He'd rather turn the agency on itself to serve his own egotistical ends while turning CISA into just another distribution option for his stolen election" conspiracy theories. Here's Eric Geller, reporting for Wired.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has frozen all of its election security work and is reviewing everything it has done tohelp state and local officials secure their electionsfor the past eight years, WIRED has learned. The move represents the first major example of the country's cyber defense agency accommodating President Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud and online censorship.
In a memo sent Friday to all CISA employees and obtained by WIRED, CISA's acting director, Bridget Bean, said she was ordering a review and assessment" of every position at the agency related to election security andcountering mis- and disinformation, as well as every election security and [mis-, dis-, and malinformation] product, activity, service, and program that has been carried out" since the federal governmentdesignatedelection systems as critical infrastructure in 2017.
There it is: CISA will now deploy its resources to investigate itself, in hopes of coaxing out some evidence" that will allow Trump to claim the agency was utilized by the Biden Administration to silence Trump voters and mute their false claims about voter fraud. On top of that, it will be prevented from addressing election misinformation going forward, which will certainly aid whatever conspiracy theorist chooses to follow in Trump's footsteps for the 2028 election. I mean, assuming we still have the national election option at that point.
Bridget Bean is the acting director of CISA. Prior to obtaining this position, she held an executive position at FEMA as a Trump appointee during his first term. Bean claims forcing CISA away from the important work of deterring actual election fraud and interference is non-negotiable, pointing to a Trump executive order that vaguely asserts its goal is restoring free speech and ending federal censorship."
What that means in this context is that CISA will no longer offer guidance to private companies when it comes to handling misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information (the MDM" referred to in the memo). Of course, the only people complaining about CISA's efforts were loyal Trumpists, who seemed to believe they should be allowed to make false claims without fear of reprisal, much less crowd-sourced correction. And it's even more of a problem now, what with the nation's most-used social media service having already abandoned fact-checking in order to more closely align its feeds (and its founder) with Trump and his supporters.
By the time this is all said and done, people who did important work in the election security/fraud field will be out of job and the agency they used to work for will be nothing more than a political weapon to be wielded against those who opposed the current president and his successors, who - if they're from the Republican party - will be just as dishonest and self-serving as the man we are again asked to pretend is our nation's leader."
Bean's memo indicates that CISA's internal review will cover every agency position related to election security, as well as performance plans for employees involved in that work; all support services provided to the election community; and all election security guidance and publications. Bean wrote that CISA will describe any steps necessary to correct any activities identified as past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech," including eliminating programs or roles.
Comply or GTFO. That's the message. Either you're going to do the Dear Leader" thing or you can start updating your resume. Whatever resources Elon Musk allows CISA to utilize will be used to conduct an internal witch hunt that will only be allowed to produce evidence that supports Trump's stolen election" hallucinations. This country is in the hands of sociopaths who view the Night of the Long Knives as a squad goal. This is not going to end well. If you harbored any doubts about the legitimacy of past elections, you're only going to have more doubts going forward. And that's the entire point: to find just enough something to allow petty would-be despots to dispute any election outcome they don't like for years to come.