As the 2020 presidential election fast approaches, so do media attempts to incite voter hysteria about the chances of it being stolen. On Tuesday's Morning Joe, dutiful MSNBC co-host Willie Geist brought on left-wing author David Shimer and former Obama Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to try to rebuild the Russian election interference narrative.
Shimer started off this fishing expedition by talking about Russian cyber attacks and claiming that President Trump invited foreign interference in our elections and continues to do so:
Russian military intelligence was systemically targeting our election systems in the summer and fall of 2016, had the ability according to folks like John Brennan to alter the voter data and even vote tallies of American citizens, to the point where on Election Day itself the White House was running a secret crisis team bracing for a Russian cyber attack against our infrastructure and that was when Barack Obama was the president. Now Donald Trump is, someone who has solicited rather than sought to deter foreign interference in our democracy
It is quite a claim that Trump has solicited foreign interference, but not an unfamiliar claim from the leftist press. Democratic Party propagandists in the media have been pushing the conspiracy theory since Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, based on not much more than vagueness in the Mueller report and uncorroborated testimony from John Bolton, which amounts to be as sturdy as plywood.
Geist then asked Shimer about wild, unfounded claims from former Senator Harry Reid:
So David, what evidence did Harry Reid provide to you that votes were changed? Because obviously that is the worst case scenario as you lay out in this book, that is the great fear that Russia or some other power could actually change the number of votes cast for one candidate or another and make a person president who did not win enough votes to become president. Did Harry Reid provide you any information on that?
Harry Reid is no stranger to making unsubstantiated lies during presidential elections, after he lied from the Senate floor in 2012 about then-Republican nominee Mitt Romney not paying taxes. To see him do it again was no shock, but Shimer’s response to the question about evidence was truly shocking:
So, what Senator Reid told me in our interview was just based on the concerns expressed to him by officials like Secretary Johnson prior to the election about the exposure of our voting systems given the slim margin by which Donald Trump won the Electoral College, he believes and is convinced that Russia did alter the vote count and that in the coming decades that such evidence will, will come out as Russian leaders start, start talking more publicly about that, but he did not have any direct evidence of this and I want to be very clear about that.
More evidence-free claims from Harry Reid, and a complicit media willing to parrot the baseless accusations in order undermine the legitimacy of an election. This is the same song and dance from 2016, just in a different form.
Prevagen sponsored this false partisan hit job against Trump. Click on the link to contact them about sponsoring such propaganda.
Read the full transcript below to learn more.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe
7/14/20
7:45 AM
DAVID SHIMER: I think I'm increasingly worried about the stability of our voting process. So to take those two buckets, the first is efforts to manipulate voters, last time around that was spreading propaganda on social media and that was stealing and releasing sensitive emails. But something history instructs is that those tactics are always evolving, and that voters should be on guard for their future iterations because they're designed to manipulate them. And if our citizens are more aware of those efforts they'll be able to mitigate the effectiveness of them in real time. The second bucket is the exposure of our actual electoral infrastructure, as I reveal in the book based on the interviews I did with 26 of President Obama former advisers,including Secretary Johnson, Russian military intelligence was systemically targeting our election systems in the summer and fall of 2016, had the ability according to folks like John Brennan to alter the voter data and even vote tallies of American citizens, to the point where on Election Day itself the White House was running a secret crisis team bracing for a Russian cyber attack against our infrastructure and that was when Barack Obama was the president. Now Donald Trump is, someone who has solicited rather than sought to deter foreign interference in our democracy, which means that, from the perspective of foreign actors, there are fewer reasons to perhaps push harder in seeking to cause chaos in our democracy.
WILLIE GEIST: Secretary Johnson, it’s Willie, let me put a question to you. Harry Reid makes some news in David's book, when he says not only does he believe that Russia targeted our voting systems, in other words changing vote tallies, but that they succeeded in it. Did you find any evidence as the Secretary of Homeland Security that Russia actually changed the number of votes cast for Donald Trump in the 2016 election?
JEH JOHNSON: No, I did not see such evidence while we were in office and I have not heard of any since. We were very concerned about that. To be clear that was probably my principal concern in the summer/fall of 2016 because we discovered that voter registration lists were vulnerable in the hands of state election officials. But as I sit here now, I do not know that Russia was able to alter the vote count or actually suppress votes, voter registration lists. But there's plenty to be concerned about as David outlines in his book, I believe the threat is ongoing, I believe Russia has never withdrawn from this behavior and I think it's something that we should be very concerned about in 2020.
GEIST: So David, what evidence did Harry Reid provide to you that votes were changed? Because obviously that is the worst case scenario as you lay out in this book, that is the great fear that Russia or some other power could actually change the number of votes cast for one candidate or another and make a person president who did not win enough votes to become president. Did Harry Reid provide you any information on that?
SHIMER: So, what Senator Reid told me in our interview was just based on the concerns expressed to him by officials like Secretary Johnson prior to the election about the exposure of our voting systems given the slim margin by which Donald Trump won the Electoral College, he believes and is convinced that Russia did alter the vote count and that in the coming decades that such evidence will, will come out as Russian leaders start, start talking more publicly about that, but he did not have any direct evidence of this and I want to be very clear about that.
