DOJ makes DREADED announcement ahead of midterms

**Brian Tyler Cohen** (0:01)
The Department of Justice makes an announcement previewing their strategy to interfere in midterms, and I interview former Obama Communications Director and co-host of Pod Save America, Dan Pfeiffer. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie.
So the question I get more than any other is about what the White House is going to do to interfere in midterms. And we just got a preview of exactly that. The Assistant Attorney General, Harmeet Dhillon, sat down for an interview on Bloomberg's Balance of Power, and she said, quote, We began our election security work almost as soon as I was sworn in last April. This is an ongoing duty and obligation. The US. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has sent monitors to election hotspots, polling places to increase voter confidence to troubleshoot problems. And we are doing that now. We just did it in the primary. We're going to do it to the tune of approximately 1000 election monitors in the November election. And this is just something that the DOJ does.
Now, let's be clear. This is a voter suppression tactic. Period. Here's why. Think about who actually gets deployed. There's not going to be bureaucrats. There's not 1000 bureaucrats sitting around. It's probably going to be the federal agents from the one agency that has more money than most militaries on the planet, which is ICE. So you've got a rogue agency answerable to one man that doesn't show their faces, doesn't wear insignia, whose entire reputation is that they are not afraid to shoot or kill Americans with impunity, who will likely be at the very polling places that Americans are expected to show up at in person in November, which might shed light on why people like Caroline Levitt outright refused to rule it out when asked.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:34)
Caroline, Steve Bannon recently said, quote, we're going to have ICE surround the polls come November. Is that something that the president is considering?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:42)
That's not something I've ever heard the president consider, no.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:45)
Can you guarantee to the American public that ICE will not be around polling locations or voting locations in November?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:53)
I can't guarantee that an ICE agent won't be around a polling location in November. I mean, that's frankly a very silly hypothetical question. But what I can tell you is I haven't heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations. It's a disingenuous question.

**Brian Tyler Cohen** (2:11)
But the fact that they feel they have to do this is just as big a story. Like, clearly the Trump administration and the broader GOP have just given up on trying to win on the merits. So they feel like their only choice at this point is to just rig the rules of the game. Just look at the environment that they're operating in. You've got 10 Trump-endorsed candidates who've already lost their own primaries this cycle. The president's approval ratings are underwater on virtually every issue that matters to voters. The economy, health care, foreign policy. Costs are higher across the board. Health care is less available. Food assistance is less available. Inflation's up. The Epstein files are being suppressed. The war that Trump swore he'd avoid is going on nine months now. And frankly, there's no way to hide any of that. There's no ad buy that erases inflation or the Iran war or a carrier full of sailors who've been stuck at sea for 250 days. When a party knows it can't win a fair fight over its record, it's got two options. It can try and change its record or it can just change the fight. This administration has made it very clear which one it's choosing. And look, the Republicans will try and sell this move as election integrity, as they've been doing for years, that a thousand federal agents need to be posted up at polling places because something is wrong with how Americans vote. But the obvious question in response to that is something is wrong based on what? Where is the evidence of any widespread fraud that justifies a thousand person federal deployment? Doesn't exist. It's never existed. Study after study, audit after audit, court case after court case, including the ones that this very administration brought in front of judges who Trump himself appointed have failed to turn up anything remotely close to the scale of fraud that would warrant this kind of response. The absence of evidence isn't some gap in the story. It is the story.
So if this isn't about fraud that exists, what's it about? It's about creating the appearance that fraud might be lurking because they need some thin pretense, some flimsy justification to justify federal agents standing inside polling places in specific communities that this administration has already landed on, has already decided to distrust. Probably black majority or young majority or Democrat majority districts in swing states. Surprise, surprise. That's not election security. That is the machinery, the basis of suppression. Because the most effective way to suppress a vote isn't always physically stopping somebody from casting a ballot. Sometimes it's just making people afraid enough or uncertain enough or to feel watched enough that turn out in the quote unquote wrong precincts just quietly drops on its own.