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Is the US intelligence apparatus preparing the public for future election interference?

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Is the warning perhaps not what it seems? Is it an attempt to provide camouflage — a strategy known as ‘pre-bunking’ — for future election interference sanctioned by the Washington political machine?

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) together with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint statement ostensibly intended to assure U.S. voters in advance that the 2024 election that, despite anticipated attacks on the country’s voting systems that might make getting election information hard for citizens to obtain, election results would nonetheless be unaffected and election integrity would be maintained.

The FBI is responsible for investigating and prosecuting election crimes and malicious cyber activity targeting election infrastructure. The CISA plays a role in securing election infrastructure from physical and cyber threats.

The joint statement, however, has been met with skepticism based on the earlier roles of both agencies in past elections and their participation in massive suppression of conservative voices in social media.

As such, is the warning perhaps not what it seems? Is it an attempt to provide camouflage — a strategy known as “pre-bunking” — for future election interference sanctioned by the Democrat-powered Washington political machine — a.k.a., the Deep State — that wants to maintain control of the White House and Congress at any cost?

“CISA & FBI issue bulletin that upcoming cyberattacks may ‘prevent the public from receiving timely information’ about the 2024 election,” conservative commentator Emerald Robinson wrote on X.

“These same agencies told you: America’s voting machines were never connected to the Internet,” Robinson noted.

Jeanette Manfra, Acting Under Secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress in 2017 that America’s voting machines “are not connected to the internet.”

Manfra was responsible for the security of the nation’s voting system. Yet according to a 2020 report by NBC News, a team of 10 cybersecurity experts who specialize in voting systems and elections found nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to the internet.

“We found over 35 (voting systems) had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” Kevin Skoglund, a senior technical adviser at the election security advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition, told NBC News at the time.

“We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet,” Skoglund said. “And we knew that wasn’t true. And so we set out to try and find the voting machines to see if we could find them on the internet, and especially the back-end systems that voting machines in the precinct were connecting to report their results.”

Can CISA be trusted?

“CISA has worked with Big Tech corporations to silence Americans since 2020,” noted Logan Washburn, writing at The Federalist last month. “A congressional report from last fall found it had become a “domestic intelligence and speech-police agency” whose behavior was ‘unconstitutional.’”

Last year, the Biden administration blocked the release of documents “revealing the extent to which deep state actors and their third-party allies interfered in the 2020 presidential election by pushing social media censorship,” according to a Breitbart report.

“The government seems particularly eager to stop the release of documents pertaining to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the closely linked Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), both of which are under intense scrutiny for their 2020 interference efforts,” Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari wrote.

Bokhari reported in May 2023 on the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee’s hearing on the government’s “laundering” of censorship through NGOs and private entities:

In the runup to the 2020 election, the consortium created a system whereby state actors including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department could file “tickets” alongside news stories, flagging them so that Big Tech platforms could subsequently suppress or attach warning labels to them.

Beyond this blatant case of a private-public censorship coalition, the EIP also engaged in partisan politics, allowing the Democratic National Committee to file tickets through the system, as well as the Democrat-aligned groups Common Cause and the NAACP.

News outlets targeted by the EIP included Breitbart News, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Epoch Times, as well as the social media accounts of prominent conservatives Charlie Kirk, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Mark Levin, James O’Keefe, and Sean Hannity, amongst others.

President Donald Trump was also frequently flagged by the consortium, as well as his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

In April, The Washington Examiner noted the connection of CISA and the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks before the election, which no doubt had a big impact on the election’s outcome, in favor of leftist Joe Biden and against incumbent Republican Donald Trump:

On Oct. 14, 2020, hours after the New York Post published a story based on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that Twitter blocked from being shared online, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center reached out to “misinformation” researchers behind the Election Integrity Partnership, a collaboration between universities, left-wing think tanks, social media companies, and the U.S. government to thwart alleged falsehoods online in the lead-up to the presidential election. That outreach from the GEC, a foreign-focused office Republican lawmakers are investigating for its ties to anti-speech projects in the United States, was apparently thanks to guidance from the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to internal documents.

The newly unearthed coordination underscores the major role that CISA, an agency under scrutiny from the House GOP for allegedly colluding “with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans” in 2020, played in the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP. Both CISA and Alex Stamos, who directed the Stanford Internet Observatory, a Stanford University office behind the EIP, have appeared to downplay CISA’s role in the partnership despite some since-released records indicating a closer relationship than previously known, the Washington Examiner reported.

CISA and the FBI: paving the way for domestic election interference?

“With Election Day less than 100 days away, it is important to help put into context some of the incidents the American public may see during the election cycle that, while potentially causing some minor disruptions, will not fundamentally impact the security or integrity of the democratic process,” CISA senior advisor Cait Conley said.

“DDoS attacks are one example of a tactic that we have seen used against election infrastructure in the past and will likely see again in the future, but they will NOT affect the security or integrity of the actual election. They may cause some minor disruptions or prevent the public from receiving timely information,” Conley suggested.

“It is important to talk about these potential issues now, because nefarious actors, like our foreign adversaries or cybercriminals, could use DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) incidents to cast doubt on the election systems or processes,” Conley said.

“Congress is still exposing the extent of the detailed coordination platform between Big Tech platforms and the Censorship Industrial Complex,” noted Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, in April. “Rather than promote free speech and free expression, this partnership was dedicated to denying it to those it did not favor.”

Questions remain: Did government agencies facilitate cheating and lie to the American people in 2020 in order to drag Biden across the finish line? Are they preparing to unconstitutionally install Kamala Harris in 2024?

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Doug Mainwaring is a journalist for LifeSiteNews, an author, and a marriage, family and children’s rights activist.  He has testified before the United States Congress and state legislative bodies, originated and co-authored amicus briefs for the United States Supreme Court, and has been a guest on numerous TV and radio programs.  Doug and his family live in the Washington, DC suburbs.

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Union Bigwigs Decline To Endorse Anyone For President Despite Rank-And-File Members Overwhelmingly Backing Trump

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Robert Schmad

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters on Wednesday declined to make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election just hours after releasing internal polling data showing that the workers it represents strongly favor former President Donald Trump.

Among rank-and-file members of the major union, 59.6% surveyed said they believe the Teamsters should endorse Trump, compared to just 31% voicing support for Vice President Kamala Harris, a more than 25-point gap that remained more or less unchanged after the union ordered a subsequent survey after the Sept. 10 presidential debate. Despite the poll results, the union refused to make an endorsement as there was “no majority support” for Harris and a lack of “universal support” for Trump, it revealed on Wednesday.

A Teamsters spokesperson did not immediately clarify why the union had different standards for the two candidates. 

“The Teamsters thank all candidates for meeting with members face-to-face during our unprecedented roundtables,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said. “Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business. We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries — and to honor our members’ right to strike — but were unable to secure those pledges.”

The union cited Trump’s refusal to commit to vetoing right-to-work legislation as part of its reasoning for not issuing an endorsement.

The Teamsters, which have historically supported Democrats and often donate to left-of-center causes, made an effort to court Republicans this election cycle. The union made a donation to the Republican National Committee, met with Trump, and O’Brien was even invited to speak at the Republican National Convention. Some on the right have resisted the union’s attempt to ingratiate itself among conservatives, like the Center for Union Facts which put up billboards outside the Republican National Convention calling the Teamsters “two-faced” over its history of liberal spending.

While Republicans were generally open to the Teamsters, the Democratic National Convention snubbed O’Brien by not allowing him to speak at the event, according to The Associated Press.

Harris is considerably less popular among rank-and-file Teamsters than President Joe Biden, who only trailed Trump by about 8 points in a survey ordered by the union prior to his withdrawal from the race. Union leadership met with Harris for a roundtable discussion on Monday, The Hill reported.

“We represent everybody from airline pilots and zookeepers, and we don’t just represent registered Democrats,” O’Brien said to reporters.

The Teamsters’ endorsement could have had a significant impact if it went to either candidate given the concentration of its members in the swing states of Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, according to Reuters.

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Daily Caller

Biden-Harris Admin’s Multi-Billion Dollar Electric School Bus Program Is A Huge Gift To China, House Report Finds

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Owen Klinsky

The Biden-Harris administration’s $5 billion Clean School Bus Program uses nearly 400% more taxpayer dollars per school bus and benefits the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a House report revealed Tuesday.

The 51-page report from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce found promoting electric school buses and other electric vehicles (EVs) enriches the CCP as the EV supply chain is roughly 90% dependent on China, raising both national security and human rights concerns. It also highlighted immense expenses for taxpayers, with the average electric school bus under the first iteration of the Clean School Bus Program — the first of three iterations — costing $381,191, nearly four times that of a typical full-sized diesel school bus.

“It is clear the $5 billion Clean School Bus Program is overall a failure and, in many cases, a waste of Americans’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” Republican Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said in a statement regarding the report’s findings. “The program, led by the radical Biden-Harris EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], props up a market that relies heavily upon a supply chain dominated by the Chinese Communist Party.”

Funded by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Clean School Bus Program provided the Biden-Harris EPA with funds over five years to “replace existing school buses with zero-emission and clean school buses.”

China currently accounts for approximately two-thirds of global EV battery cell production, while the U.S. manufactured just 7% as of 2022, raising national security concerns as the U.S. would likely have to depend on Chinese EV technology for its electric school buses, according to the report. Furthermore, the government-subsidized purchases of electric school buses under the Clean School Bus Program incentivize pre-existing human rights abuses in the EV supply, including the use of Uyghur forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region.

The report also identified limited range as an issue, with standard electric school buses from leading manufacturer BlueBird able to travel just 120 miles on a single charge, while some propane models can travel 400 miles before needing to refuel. The range problem can also be exacerbated by cold and warm weather conditions, with a study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory finding electric transit buses lose roughly a third of their range at 25 degrees Fahrenheit compared to ideal conditions.

Electric school buses also increase the risk of fraud due to a lack of documentation requirements for contractors, with the EPA relying solely on self-certified applications and estimates created by applicants, according to the report. A separate July report from a Maryland county’s Office of the Inspector General resulted in millions of dollars in “wasteful spending.”

“The EPA launched the Clean School Bus program without sufficient safeguards and considerations for practical hurdles applicants may face. For example, the EPA did not require documentation for some of the required application information and allowed contractors enthused at the opportunity to receive federal funding to apply on behalf of unknowing school districts, some of which eventually withdraw from the program,” the report states. “The EPA failed to account for the considerable electric infrastructure upgrades that electrifying a school bus fleet could require, potentially leading to delays for schools in utilizing their new buses.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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