This Is How Trump Is Already Threatening the Midterms – The White House did not respond to a request for comment regarding the meetings, but an official who was not authorized to go on the record, told WIRED at the time: “The White House does not comment on mysterious meetings with unnamed staffers.”
Simultaneously, Trump has also sought to clear officials of any misconduct in the wake of the 2020 election. Last year, Trump offered “full, complete and unconditional” pardons to a slate of people who had tried, and failed, to assist him change the 2020 election results. In recent months, Trump has urged Colorado governor Jared Polis to release Tina Peters, the former county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, who became a hero for the right’s election deniers after she aided a security breach during a software update of her county’s election administration system.
Peters was found guilty of four felonies, but Trump has been launching a campaign in recent months to get her released, even going so far as to suggest he “pardoned” her, even though he has no right to do so given she was convicted on state charges.
Election Day Interference
While Trump has not declared explicit plans to deploy troops to polling stations or confiscate voting machines, he and his administration have undoubtedly been signaling that such action is not off the table.
In January, Trump lamented not having the National Guard seize specific voting devices after the 2020 election. In early February, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that while she hasn’t explicitly heard Trump addressing the issue, she couldn’t “guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November.” (The question came in reference to former White House adviser Steve Bannon stating: “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again … We will never again allow an election to be stolen.”)
Earlier this month, at his confirmation hearing to head up the Department of Homeland Security, Senator Markwayne Mullin claimed he would be willing to deploy ICE to polling locations to address “a specific threat.”
The result of the Trump administration’s constant diet of threats and dog whistles is that individuals who are organizing elections in states around the country are already war-gaming what happens if ICE or the National Guard show up at their voting locations.
Michael McNulty, the policy director of Issue One, a nonprofit that analyzes the role of money in politics, also points to the fact that the Department of Justice deployed monitors to watch elections in November in New Jersey and California, despite no federal elections being place. “The concern is that this could become a massive deployment of, quote unquote, observers by the DOJ in 2026 who might do something more, whether it’s intimidation, whether it’s interfering with local election officials, to get data to confirm conspiracy theories,” McNulty tells WIRED.
FBI Raids
On January 28, the FBI invaded the election office in Fulton County, Georgia, executing a search order that enabled it to confiscate ballots, ballot pictures, tabulator recordings, and the voter lists pertaining to the 2020 election. The search warrant affidavit, unsealed a few weeks ago, shows that the FBI relied on the work of Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who was appointed by the administration to investigate election security in October and who has a long history of working with some of the country’s biggest election deniers, including Patrick Byrne, Mike Lindell, and Kari Lake. Olsen’s assertions are based on disproved and extensively examined conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election.
The raid was particularly remarkable for the presence of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who is, according to The Guardian, pursuing a parallel inquiry into the 2020 race with the apparent implicit assent of Trump. This Is How Trump Is Already Threatening the Midterms
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