Election experts are baffled that the Department of Justice still hasn't indicated whether it's investigating reports that Donald Trump's supporters accessed federally protected voting machines.
The DOJ hasn't made clear if it intends to investigate reported breaches where Trump allies allegedly copied sensitive information and software – and election experts are concerned the stolen data might be used to interfere with next year's presidential election, reported the Los Angeles Times.
“We’re never going to know what the overall plan here was,” said Susan Greenhalgh, senior advisor on election security for the nonprofit Free Speech For People. “Don’t we need to know that? We don’t know what this was all about, and it’s dangerous to guess or assume that, ‘Oh well, because President [Joe] Biden was inaugurated on [Jan. 20], this no longer poses a threat.’”
Greenhalgh and more than a dozen other experts asked the DOJ to open an investigation in December into what they called a “multi-state conspiracy to copy voting software,” and they're frustrated that agency leaders have been noncommittal about opening investigations into efforts in Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and possibly elsewhere to break into election machines.
“We haven’t been told on a national level that there was a commitment to ensure that all of the elections and all of those locations [and] any allegations have been effectively investigated,” said Mark Bowling, who spent 20 years at the FBI working on cybersecurity. “I think it’s important that that message be communicated that the premier law enforcement agency in the world has looked into this, and has looked into this with all of its capabilities.”
The FBI may not be certain whether copying that information is a violation of federal law, according to a former DOJ trial attorney in the civil rights division.
“You don’t want to bring a criminal case where your case is that ‘arguably’ the law applies,” said former DOJ attorney David Becker, now executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “You want to get a conviction, especially in a case like this. If I were a prosecutor in a case involving this kind of election denial, I want to be damn sure I’m gonna get a conviction, because an acquittal might be used to further the disinformation machine.”
But Greenhalgh believes federal law enforcement agencies shouldn't leave the investigations up to individual states because there appears to be a broader conspiracy.
“If [investigations are] limited only to the states, we’re not going to know ... if there is a bigger intention, what it is, and what threat it might pose to our nation’s security and election security going forward,” Greenhalgh said.
“If this was the electrical grid or nuclear energy plants, or the water supply, and if people who had engaged in efforts to undermine and overthrow our elected government officials then were going to access the software that controls other critical national security assets, wouldn’t the federal government be interested in investigating that? I would hope so.”