Tag: Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

President Trump used a primetime address Thursday night to accuse China of interfering with the 2020 election, despite a U.S. intelligence assessment finding no evidence to support his claim. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Trump’s accusations were, quote, “totally fabricated and a malicious smear,” unquote.

During the speech, Trump announced he was declassifying documents that show what he called “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” but Trump offered no evidence that China or any other nation had directly interfered with the recent elections, including in 2020, when President Trump lost to Joe Biden. This is part of what Trump said last night.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it. It is not defensible. Hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot-counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption. China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections. Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls, and yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail.

AMY GOODMAN: After the speech, all 24 Democratic governors in the United States issued a joint statement saying, quote, “It’s deeply alarming that President Trump continues to try to undermine free and fair elections. No amount of lies and conspiracy theories can change the fact that our country’s elections have repeatedly been proven to be safe and secure. These attacks are intended to intimidate and silence voters,” the governors wrote.

President Trump ended his speech by urging lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But most importantly, addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America Act. How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat? The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat, because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way.

AMY GOODMAN: Voting rights activists have warned the SAVE America Act could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.

We’re joined now by Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, author of the book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It.

Ari, what were your takeaways from last night’s primetime address? Fascinatingly, a number of news outlets did not run it live or pulled away to it — away from it to counter what they said were President Trump’s lies, that they weren’t just going to give him a platform for them.

ARI BERMAN: Hi, Amy. Well, thank you for having me back on the show. It’s an honor to be on twice in one week.

But I have to say that Trump’s speech was shockingly weak. It had no new evidence, despite him claiming that there would be really big news — no new evidence about the 2020 election, no evidence that votes were tampered in some kind of way, that election equipment was accessed in some kind of way. The declassified documents did not show what claimed — Trump claimed they purported to show. And so, really, if Trump was trying to build another case, because he’s been making this argument for six years but was trying to build a smoking gun case that the 2020 election was stolen, he failed miserably.

That said, I am still very concerned that this speech is intended to lay the groundwork for the administration to interfere in the midterms and that his speech is going to ratchet up pressure to interfere in the midterms. And he’s going to point to all the things he’s done, all the intelligence he’s declassified, and say, “Now I have evidence,” even though he doesn’t have the evidence, but he’s going to claim he has the evidence to do things like attempt to seize voting machines, stop mail voting, require proof of citizenship to register to vote. And so, even though the speech itself was very underwhelming, the threats to fair elections remain, and, if anything, have gotten more dire in the wake of the speech.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ari, I’m wondering if you could comment on two things: one, this whole issue of this president talking about interference in elections, when he’s directly tried to influence or interfere elections recently in Argentina, in Colombia, in Honduras, actually threatening voters in those countries if they didn’t vote for — what the United States would do if they didn’t vote for his candidate, and also this whole issue of dead people. He keeps raising dead people voting. Well, anybody who knows anything about elections knows the last thing a family thinks about when a loved one dies is removing them from the voter rolls. So, it usually will take about two years or more for any state to actually purge people who have passed away from their voter rolls. He doesn’t talk about dead people voting; he talks about the dead people being on the rolls. Wondering your thoughts.

ARI BERMAN: Yeah, Juan, those are all really good points. I want to make a comments in response to them. Number one, if anyone has benefited from foreign interference in U.S. elections, it’s been Donald Trump. He benefited from Russian interference in the 2016 election. He benefited from Russian interference the 2020 election. He totally ignored the evidence of that. So, to the extent that there was interference in elections, it was Russia helping Trump.

Secondly, America is the last country in the world that should talk about foreign election interference, given what America has done all across the world for so many decades overturning elections, and in particular what Trump has done to overturn elections, to just oust leaders altogether, to invade countries unprovoked. I mean, it’s the height of hypocrisy for him to say we’re concerned about foreign election meddling, given that the U.S., under Trump, is the one that’s doing all the foreign election meddling.

And then, to your last point, yes, there may be some dead people that are still on the voter rolls because they have not been removed. There may be some small number of noncitizens who are on the voter rolls accidentally. That does not mean they are voting in American elections. There is no evidence dead people are voting in elections. There is very, very little evidence that noncitizens are voting in American elections. I’ll just give you one example. Trump claimed in his speech 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote. It turned out that number was actually 10,000 when they released the data. That number is likely wildly inflated because of false positives and inaccuracies in DHS databases.

So, we know American elections are secure, because the results are audited extensively at the state level. They’re reviewed at the federal level. The 2020 election was meant — was reviewed and found to be the most secure in American history. Trump keeps talking about the 2020 election, A, because he’s a petty narcissist who can’t get over his defeat, but, B, because he wants to create the predicate to interfere in the midterms. And I believe that’s what this speech was ultimately all about.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Trump threatening NBC and ABC for not fully airing the speech.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech — they knew what it was about — because of the fact that they don’t like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is, and they don’t want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country, and that’s true. You can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses. They use our public multibillion-dollar-in-value airwaves for absolutely no money. They pay nothing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was President Trump last night threatening the licenses once again, this time of NBC and ABC. The significance of this? And also, he keeps talking about the voter rolls being for sale and foreign countries taking them, though the documents he declassified do not reveal this. But the fact is, voting rolls are for sale. Is that right, Ari? People have access to them.

ARI BERMAN: Yeah, Amy, so, first, I’ll just talk about the media. I mean, it’s chilling that Trump threatened the broadcast licenses of networks that did not show this speech. However, it was heartening that so many networks chose not to show this speech. Trump has tried to intimidate the media in so many different ways, and it felt like, finally, some elements of the corporate-funded media have said, “We’ve had enough. We’ve had enough of Trump. We’ve had enough of Trump’s lies.” And obviously, that’s going to drive Trump crazy. But it was ultimately good for democracy that they didn’t show his speech.

In terms of the voter rolls, yes, you can purchase publicly available information. Candidates can purchase it. Other entities can purchase it. That is different than saying that foreign countries hacked into voter rolls or somehow manipulated election systems. That’s what Trump wanted you to believe. He wanted you to believe that China somehow accessed illegally election systems, somehow changed votes or did something else to manipulate the outcome. That’s not true, and that would be very, very difficult to do in our system.

There are some vulnerabilities that remain in American elections. Ironically, Trump has made those worse. He’s gutted the cybersecurity agencies. He’s disbanded task forces aimed at stopping foreign election interference. He has put cronies and political hacks in charge of things like the FBI and DHS and the DOJ. And so, if Trump was really serious about stopping foreign election interference, which he isn’t, he would not have gutted all the protections against that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ari, briefly, if you could respond to — your reaction to the testimony of Todd Blanche before Congress over his confirmation as attorney general?

ARI BERMAN: Well, I would just say, in general, it was really shocking to me that Blanche described himself still as Trump’s lawyer, when he’s supposed to be head of the Department of Justice. I would also argue it was extremely concerning to hear Jay Clayton, when he was the nominee to be director of national intelligence, refusing to say that Joe Biden won the election. I mean, this is such a basic question that Biden won the 2020 election. The fact that you still have even the, quote-unquote, “reasonable” Trump people refusing to say that Biden won the election just shows how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone and how much the election deniers have taken over every aspect of the federal government in Trump’s second term.

AMY GOODMAN: Ari Berman, thanks so much for being with us, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It.