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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bulwark. And I'm joined by my dear friend, the very talented Aaron Banko, National. Why are you laughing? Don't laugh at that. You are my dear friend. You are my dear friend. You are very talented national security reporter for Reuters. Aaron and I worked long ago at the Daily Beast. Aaron, you've been writing a lot on. Even though you're. Well, I guess they're kind of coming together. You write on national security and the intelligence community, and yet your most recent stories have been on election integrity, or election security, I should say, and the administration's efforts to basically undo or sack a bunch of people, election officials. This is all culminating tonight, which is why we have you on this program, because Trump's giving a speech. We think we know it's about, like, you know, the Chinese hack the election. I don't know.
- [00:56]
B
What is your.
- [00:57]
A
Yeah, well, what is your latest? As we record score this at 1:20pm on Thursday, what's your latest sense of what it's going to be about?
- [01:05]
B
So I think, you know, headline broadly, you know, our election infrastructure is unreliable. Can't trust it. That's, I think, kind of the main message we expect Trump to talk about, or sort of the message he wants to send to Americans. And then, I think, you know, sort of under that headline are two broad buckets of information. We'll probably hear about, you know, foreign interference in US elections or alleged foreign interference in US Elections or intent of foreign countries to maybe one day interfere. Right. I think we're a little unsure whether or not Trump is going to claim outright that a country, you know, interfered in our elections or that they had the intent and ability to interfere. Those are two very different things. But broadly speaking, he's going to be focusing on China a lot, and then he'll also mention Venezuela. And, you know, each of those countries have sort of a different backstory to them when it comes to US Elections. And the narrative from the White House.
- [02:06]
A
Yeah, let's get into backstory in a second. But first, sort of the buildup. So I guess the first question I have is, why is this all happening now?
- [02:15]
B
So, listen, I've been covering this world only since the beginning of his second term, and the reason for that is because, you know, sort of in an unprecedented way, the intelligence community got really involved in election work right away under mostly Tulsi Gabbard was sort of at the helm of that effort. And so we've been tracking what the administration has been doing broadly. But Also very specifically within the ic, and it's all part of this effort by the administration across several different federal agencies, to sort of reshape the way Americans vote. And so whether it's the DOJ working on this or ODNI or what have you, that's sort of like the basic premise of what they've been trying to achieve. And so the intelligence community specifically has been looking at our voting infrastructure, our voting machines, the machines themselves, whether or not they have flaws or vulnerabilities or need updates. So we've seen seizures of machines in Puerto Rico. We've seen seizure of materials from Georgia. So this has been a running theme in the intelligence community for quite some time. There's been sort of parallel investigations, one within ODNI and one from the White House under their former Election Integrity Director. And a lot of this, though, was sort of probed and looked at and almost finished last October. So we were expecting to see something come out, you know, maybe in January or late last year. And so. But what we were worried about was that they might wait until it was too late to fix anything. Right. If there really were vulnerabilities in machines or flaws in machines that could be fixed. Right. Like, these are flaws we've known about for a long time. And flaws, by the way, don't necessarily mean that votes are going to be flipped. It just means your computer needs an update, machines need updates. But what we were worried about is that they'd wait till the very last minute to say anything and then say, well, it's too late, so gotta go to paper, or we're gonna send the federal government.
- [04:24]
A
I wouldn't rule out that possibility. Right. Like, there's a possibility tonight, for instance, that he does something like that where the. I don't want to get to that in a second. But you also reported on the firing of members of the Election Assistance Commission.
- [04:38]
B
Yeah.
- [04:39]
A
Which I think connected, obviously, part of this. Right. So I don't think a lot of people know what the EAC does and why it's significant, why states are kind of freaking out about this.
- [04:47]
B
Right.
- [04:47]
A
Can you explain that?
- [04:49]
B
Yeah. So the EAC is, you know, a bipartisan commission that's supposed to be overseen by Congress. And what it does, basically, is it works with state and local officials to administer elections. And that can mean a lot of different things. But one of the main core functions of the EAC is they need to pass guidelines and certified guidelines that states are supposed to follow in terms of how they use their actual machines, what systems they're supposed to be running on. Right. Like, they're the, they're the body that creates the guidelines that the states look to or the locals look to for what should we be doing on elections? And so what Trump did is he sort of ousted the remaining leaders of that agency, and it really did leave the agency paralyzed in the sense that they can't take up any new business by their bylaws. They can't really do anything at this point. And so, you know, if we hear Trump tonight talking about voting machines and vulnerabilities, and we know the White House has been very anti EAC for a long time because they think that they're not helping the issue. The question is.