The news cycle this week has been understandably dominated by the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, where armed agents were supposedly looking for classified documents the FBI believes were improperly removed from the White House at the end of Trump’s term, in violation of federal law.
But the FBI raid is just a piece of a much larger story that’s playing out in slow motion and in plain sight: the rigging of the 2024 presidential election.
Much like the 2020 election, which wasn’t stolen so much as rigged months in advance to give Joe Biden an advantage that all but guaranteed his victory, the 2024 election is being rigged to ensure that Trump either cannot run or, if he does run, cannot win.
First, consider the FBI raid. No serious person believes that a documents dispute was the real purpose of the raid. The idea that the FBI would search the home of a former president and potential 2024 GOP candidate over an ongoing (and not uncommon) disagreement over presidential records with the National Archives is absurd on its face.
In his brief and self-congratulatory press conference Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he personally authorized the search on Trump’s home, that the Justice Department “does not take such a decision lightly,” and that it always seeks to use a “less intrusive means as an alternative to a search, and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken.”
But if that were true, it more or less rules out the theory that the FBI was looking for classified documents. The disagreement between the National Archives and Trump has been ongoing for months, and Trump’s lawyers have been cooperating with the relevant authorities. Raiding Trump’s private residence over that — and in the process triggering a political crisis — makes zero sense.
As some expert observers have pointed out, including my colleague Margot Cleveland, a far more plausible explanation is that the FBI was perhaps on a fishing expedition, looking for evidence that could implicate Trump in the Jan. 6 riot. It’s no secret that Democrats and the Jan. 6 Committee want Garland to charge Trump with “seditious conspiracy” in hopes of making it impossible for Trump to run in 2024. In that case, a documents dispute with the National Archives would be nothing more than a flimsy pretext to get into Trump’s residence and look for incriminating evidence related to Jan. 6.
The raid and its possible role in the schemes of the Jan. 6 Committee, though, are part of a larger effort underway to recreate the conditions of 2020, just in case Trump escapes indictment and does run. This week, Twitter announced it would begin enforcing its Civics Integrity Project for the 2022 midterms: “This means we’ll take action against misleading claims about the voting process, misleading content intended to intimidate or dissuade people from participating in the election, or misleading claims that may undermine public confidence in elections outcomes.”
And what that means, in light of Twitter’s past behavior around election time, is that anyone who questions the voting processes or outcomes, however justifiably and no matter what irregularities are afoot, will be shut down by Twitter.
The targets here are painstakingly clear: Trump voters who believe, rightly, that the 2020 election was riddled with irregularities, last-minute changes to voting rules, and absentee ballot fraud. The best way to understand Twitter’s midterm elections policy, which is itself a preview of its 2024 policy, is that anyone who complains about universal absentee voting, ballot harvesting, remote ballot drop boxes, loose voter ID rules, or any other Democrat-favored policies that are known to make elections less secure will be silenced on Twitter.
Why? Because Democrats plan to run the same play in 2024 they ran in 2020, and their allies in Big Tech don’t want anyone pointing it out.
The irony here is that Twitter itself was perhaps the single greatest source of disinformation in the 2020 election. By quashing the New York Post’s valid and verified Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks before the election, and then locking the Post’s account (along with some people who tried to tweet the Post’s reporting on the laptop, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany), Twitter arguably tipped the balance of the election. It brazenly hid a story from its users that, had they seen it, would have been quite damaging to Biden and certainly would have caused some people to change their votes.
In addition to the machinations of Big Tech, nonprofit groups run by Democrat operatives have not stopped their schemes to boost voter turnout in Democrat-heavy areas under the guise of nonpartisan voter registration drives and voter roll update efforts.
As my colleague Victoria Marshall reported this week, a voter-roll management system used by 31 states and the District of Columbia is sharing voter registration data with the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), one of two leftist groups that funneled $419 million to local election offices for the purpose of driving up Democrat voter turnout in 2020.
The system, called the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, is supposedly a convenient tool that simply allows states to update their voter rolls. But its real purpose, according to a recent report by independent research group Verity Vote, is to boost Democrat voter turnout by forwarding state voter roll data, including records from unregistered voters, to CEIR.
As Marshall reports, “CEIR then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach. As part of their agreement with ERIC, states are not allowed to disclose any data they send to nor receive from ERIC, however, ERIC is not under the same constraints and is able to work with CEIR.”
In addition, it seems ERIC doesn’t exist to purge or update voter rolls so much as to inflate them, identifying 17 million new voters in 2020 compared to purging just 3 million from state voter rolls. Despite its failure to clean voter rolls, a majority of states are still using the system, which is run by a left-wing activist named David Becker. The purpose of ERIC by now is clear: It’s not about cleaning voter rolls but identifying and registering likely Democrat voters. And 31 states are using it.
This is just a sampling of what’s happening right now. The FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence has rightly captured headlines and provoked outrage this week, but understand that the same powerful people, companies, and nonprofits that conspired to rig the 2020 election are right now rigging the 2024 election, using many of the same tactics. They’re doing it because they think they can get away with it — and if Republicans don’t act now to stop them, they certainly will.