Trump pushes legal limits as election bombshell drops

**David Pakman** (0:00)
Today, a whistleblower inside the Postal Service is sounding an extraordinary alarm about the midterms. Potentially millions of Americans may get their mail in ballots late or they may not get them at all. Now, meanwhile, the Supreme Court has handed Donald Trump a stunning loophole where something may be illegal, but there may be nobody who can actually get into court and stop Trump from doing it. What are guardrails if no one can enforce them? And then we have to talk about Donald Trump himself. I'm not even talking about the strange physical glitches, although doctors are now noting those. And I'm not talking about Trump falling asleep all the time. But that is going on. I'm talking about Trump insulting his own followers over data centers. And we have some remarkable documents showing just how sophisticated Russian influence operations have become. This is not, oh, what did Putin tell you to do it? These are really sophisticated operations that we will be talking about a lot to get to. Plus, my interview with Daron Acemoglu, a very interesting conversation. All of that and more today.
This is an absolute bombshell. And if you're planning to vote by mail in the midterm elections, you need to know about this right now. There's a whistleblower inside the US. Postal Service who's warning that potentially millions of Americans might straight up not get their mail in ballots. You might be planning to vote by mail. You might be, as far as you know, expecting a mail in ballot, and you might not get it. So let's start with the whistleblower's words. They are stunning, who says, quote, potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner or at all.
The in a timely manner is bad enough. And they've been sort of scheming on what if we can delay mail in ballots the Republicans have, the Magas have. But now it's you might not get it at all. So it's not. It shows up a couple of days later than you thought. But there's still plenty of time to fill it out and submit it and to have it counted. It's it just doesn't show up. A whistleblower is warning that if this indeed happens, as The New York Times is reporting, it could throw these elections into complete and total chaos. This is being called a secretive rushed attempt to implement Donald Trump's mail in voting executive order. And there is a particularly important detail in the middle of all of this. And you know what it is because I've been covering this, which is that a federal judge already said you can't do that.
Judge Indira Talwani has temporarily blocked this plan. This was last week. We already spoke about it. And that is because the judge concluded that it exceeds the authority of the US. Postal Service. And by the way, it would cause completely insane chaos, which would result when you change election procedures barely two months before the midterm elections. But according to this new whistleblower, they kept working on this system even after a judge said you're not allowed to do that. And the whistleblower is describing the consequences as a, quote, catastrophic failure. Now apparently there's an almost unbelievable potential failure point in all of this, which is that the Postal Service has been rushing to create a new digital verification system for the mail-in ballots. And according to the report, and this is insane that you would design a system like this, if even one barcode on one single ballot doesn't scan correctly, the verification process could reject tens of thousands of ballots contained in that bulk mailing batch. One barcode could disable tens of thousands of ballots. And they're trying to do it not for the 2028 election or the 2030 election. They're trying to do it for an election that is, I guess, eight and a half weeks away or nine weeks away as of today. Eight, nine weeks, something like that. Now, remember why Donald Trump even says that all of this crap is necessary. He has spent years saying vote by mail is inherently corrupt. It's fraudulent. It's basically cheating. If you vote by mail, you're cheating. If people encourage you to vote by mail, they are cheating. Now, there's no evidence of widespread mail in ballot fraud.
We, you know, if you look at a system in a country of 340 million people, will you find some instances of someone voted then died before the election day and their vote was counted? Well, yeah, you can find some of that and different states have different rules as to how you deal with that. Can you find instances of someone who is Tom Smith Jr. submitting a ballot and it's counted as a ballot ballot for Tom Smith Sr. who died? You can find some instances of that. Now, it's still only one person voting and one vote, but the junior vote was attributed to senior. Can you find some instances of someone deliberately attempting to commit some kind of fraudulent voting act? You can. But we are talking about a number of votes that wouldn't even flip a single precinct, never mind state or election result. We would love the number to be zero country of 340 million people. You're going to have some of these anomalous or anomalous instances. But that doesn't mean that you go and you upend an entire system. Now there is another small problem with Trump's argument of voting by mail is inherently corrupt, which is that Donald Trump regularly votes by mail. He has voted by mail twice this year and many times in the past. So it's another one of these situations where we have a system that's horribly corrupt. It's rife with cheating except Donald Trump uses it. And it's not a problem when he does it. Now, underlying all of this, we should talk about the political incentive. If Republicans really believed, if we make it as easy as possible for people to vote, we're going to win because we've done such a great job. In other words, we just have to allow the will of the people who are very happy with us to rise to the top and we will win. If they believe that, do you think that they would be spending this much time and this much energy and this many resources on making it harder to vote by mail? So the obvious concern, and we've been talking about this since 2012 in Mitt Romney's campaign back when I was only five years old, this is not about preventing fraud. This is about changing who successfully gets to vote.