Attention to the Unseen

Garrett M Graff writes: Within minutes of Donald Trump tweeting that he had fired Christopher Krebs as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency Tuesday night, Twitter slapped on a warning label that the accompanying claim about electoral fraud “is disputed.” The disinformation warning was, in some ways, a fitting denouement to a two-week-long battle between Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and his boss in the Oval Office. Ultimately, Krebs’ mission to…

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Politico reports: Sen. Shelley Moore Capito was scheduled to speak with the government’s top cybersecurity official on Wednesday. But the night before, Christopher Krebs was cast out of a job. “I was going to tell him thank you for a good job” helping to secure the 2020 election, Capito (R-W.Va.) said after checking her schedule to see if the call was still on. “I’m still going to tell him that — just not today.” President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening…

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Vox reports: Republican officials in Wayne County, Michigan, made a stunning move to block the certification of their presidential election results Tuesday — but backed down a few hours later amid intense criticism. Wayne County is the largest county in the state, it includes the city of Detroit (where the vast majority of the population is Black), and it votes heavily for Democrats. As with all Michigan counties, its election results go to a bipartisan board of canvassers for certification…

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ProPublica reports: Long before Republican senators began publicly denouncing how Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger handled the voting there, he withstood pressure from the campaign of Donald Trump to endorse the president for reelection. Raffensperger, a Republican, declined an offer in January to serve as an honorary co-chair of the Trump campaign in Georgia, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica. He later rejected GOP requests to support Trump publicly, he and his staff said in interviews. Raffensperger said he…

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CNN reports: President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired the Department of Homeland Security official who had rejected Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. Trump announced on Twitter he was firing Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and directly tied it to Krebs’ statement that said there “is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” “The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of…

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WSB-TV reports: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has started firing back after more than a week of criticism from President Donald Trump. Raffensperger says it was the president’s own attacks on absentee ballots that cost him the election in Georgia. “He would have won by 10,000 votes. He actually suppressed, depressed his own voting base,” Raffensperger said. The Secretary of State said some 24,500 Georgia Republicans who voted absentee in the June primary, didn’t vote in the general election. Raffensperger…

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Jonathan V. Last writes: Donald Trump is the past, present, and future of the Republican Party. And that is because the GOP is no longer a traditional political party designed to win elections so that it can enact a policy agenda. It is a personality cult built around grievance. To understand its true nature, you must first understand how weak Trump was as an electoral force. It is devilishly hard to unseat an elected president. Trump is only the third…

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The Washington Post reports: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), to question the validity of legally cast absentee ballots in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state. In a wide-ranging interview about the election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation over a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia…

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