Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, warned that former President Donald Trump's recent speech was setting the stage to seize control of the 2022 midterm elections. Speaking on MSNBC, Himes said, 'I'm not an alarmist, but understand what happened tonight: the president was setting the context, he was setting the basis for him to turn around, at midnight on Election Day and say, “I warned you, I warned you back in July that the Chinese were doing XYZ and the Venezuelans were doing XYZ and all this terrible stuff. It happened tonight. I am deploying federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security to the seven states, they will be seizing ballot boxes in those states because we know that lots of undocumented aliens voted in those states. So we are seizing ballot boxes.”'
Democracy at Risk
Himes emphasized the gravity of such a scenario, asking, 'What happens when all of a sudden we’ve lost the chain of custody of 70 ballot boxes? That is the moment in which American democracy dies.' He drew a direct line to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, stating, 'Part of the energy you’re hearing from me tonight is the fact that I was one of the last people out of the chamber of the House of Representatives on January 6th 2021. I saw our democracy come this close to ending. And the energy you are hearing from me tonight is that I actually see the path, and this is the moment for every American to go to whitehouse.gov, as the president asked you to do, to look at the China section, to read the report.'
CIA Director's Statement
Himes also noted that his former colleague, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, released a carefully worded statement. According to Himes, Ratcliffe said his agency 'produced key intelligence reporting' but did not assert that any foreign interference in the 2020 election had actually taken place. Ratcliffe's statement indicated that the intelligence showed only that 'Venezuela’s government had developed capabilities to manipulate electronic voting systems, raising serious concerns for U.S. election infrastructure security' and that China tried 'to influence the 2020 election against President Trump'—not that either nation had actually attempted or succeeded in manipulating vote totals in the election Trump lost.
Next Steps
We will be taking the congressman’s advice and carefully evaluating the actual material produced by the White House to back Trump’s latest claims about the 2020 election in the hours ahead, and will report back soon with our findings.
