Evil is Watching
As our nation distracts itself, evil is watching and plotting
“On November 7, 2000, American voters went to the polls in what turned out to be one of the closest presidential contests in U.S. history-an election campaign during which there was a notable absence of serious discussion of the al Qaeda threat or terrorism. Election night became a 36-day legal fight. Until the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling on December 12 and Vice President Al Gore's concession, no one knew whether Gore or his Republican opponent, Texas Governor George W. Bush, would become president in 2001.
“The dispute over the election and the 36-day delay cut in half the normal transition period. Given that a presidential election in the United States brings wholesale change in personnel, this loss of time hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting, clearing, and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees.” §6.4, 9/11 Commission Report.
On November 3, 2020, the nation went back to the polls and twenty years after the contentious 2000 election, we find ourselves in a new one. For all intents and purposes, Joe Biden is President-Elect of the United States. To overcome this, President Trump’s team must show enough widespread voter irregularities to cast doubt on the election. That does not mean the Trump campaign must simply show a lot of fraud. It means they must show enough improper votes were cast to erase both the margin of victory between the President and President-Elect in addition to enough improper votes equal to the number of votes not cast in the race.
As of this writing, in Michigan, Biden leads Trump by 146,137 votes and 37,706 people in Michigan refused to vote in the presidential race even though they voted on Election Day. They left that line blank. That means the Trump Campaign must show 183,843 fraudulent votes were cast. Then they must do the same in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and any other state they want to contest by the margins in those states.
President Trump’s campaign team asserts it has 234 pages of affidavits asserting voter fraud. In a review by Leon Wolf at the conservative outlet The Blaze, Wolf wrote, “[t]he 234 pages contain affidavits from 101 individuals. The majority of them appear to be handwritten impressions of the counting process.” Further, he writes, “The testimony contained in these affidavits clearly pertains to fewer than 1,000 total ballots.” That is not enough to throw out the election.
While this is going on, the current administration is denying the incoming administration national security briefings. President Trump has every right to challenge the election results. The Electoral College does not convene until December 14, 2020. There is time for this to play out. But the odds are slim that the election will be overturned. Every day this administration does not brief Joe Biden is a day our national security is increasingly jeopardized.
Joe Biden had been Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He served as Vice President of the United States for eight years. He can keep a secret. President Trump may pull a miracle out of a hat and preserve his presidency. But the odds are against him and so long as he is not willing to at least aid in briefing the probable winner, the odds are against the nation’s security.
“During the long contest after election day, the CIA set up an office in Crawford to pass intelligence to Bush and some of his key advisers. [CIA Director] Tenet, accompanied by his deputy director for operations, James Pavitt, briefed President-elect Bush at Blair House during the transition.” §6.4, 9/11 Commission Report.
The Clinton Administration in 2000 began providing briefings to President George W. Bush while the contentious legal battles of that year’s election were ongoing and Florida was still counting and recounting just in case he really was the winner. The Trump Administration is not currently doing that for Joe Biden.
I understand President Trump’s unwillingness to concede until every allegation is addressed in court. It is his right to pursue challenges. But the President owes the nation a national security transition that can catch what the chaotic transition of 2000 missed — evil stirring in the shadows.
Erick, I think your judgment about the likelihood of Biden becoming President is correct, because even if there was a massive amount of election fraud, Trump has a limited amount of time to prove it in court, and a powerful establishment that doesn't want it to be proved. For example, Al Capone was clearly guilty of many imprisonable offenses but his control of politicians and judges kept him out of prison for a long time. There is a difference between being guilty and being pronounced guilty in court, and in the final judgment God will right all wrongly decided cases.
I also agree about granting Biden intelligence briefings as a courtesy, even if it is something not required by law. But I note in your quote from the 911 report this statement: "Given that a presidential election in the United States brings wholesale change in personnel, this loss of time hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting, clearing, and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees.” I don't recall a lot of people who now want Biden briefed being upset with the obstruction inflicted upon the Trump administration even after he assumed office. Was evil not watching during those events? It is also not clear that Biden needs to be briefed on intelligence over 2 months in advance, as it will be Trump who is making decisions until January 20, not Biden. The NYT always seems to claim they have anonymous information from high-level intelligence officials in the Trump administration. Is there any reason to doubt that they won't make the same claim about intelligence information if Biden is given access now, allowing intelligence policy to be impacted by a newspaper that relies on anonymous sources to promote its own political agenda.
I know that you have a pretty intense dislike for Trump and you and Leon Wolf were among the NeverTrump movement that considers itself righteous and the guardian of True-Conservatism. However, Never Trump got virtually no prediction about Trump correct, e.g.: 1. Trump appointed constitutional supporting judges just as he promised. 2. Trump supported the pro-life movement as much or more than any other President. 3. Trump built 400 miles of the border wall despite intense opposition. 4. Trump slashed huge amounts of government regulations just as he promised. 5. Trump got NATO countries to increase their funding despite intense opposition. 6. Trump got new trade agreements negotiated. 7. Trump increased his support among blacks and Hispanics, perhaps because they think he is a better neighbor to them than the Democrats who promise them everything but deliver them nothing. 8. Trump established a good relationship with the Mexican President Obrador, who probably understands that the drug cartels are the primary beneficiary of a USA with a porous southern border.
I agree with you/Wolf that in-person elections make it difficult to commit large amounts of fraud. But the same may not be true of elections with large amounts of mail-in votes. In PA, the application for a mail-in-ballot that was sent to people asks for a PA drivers license number or a Penn-Dot ID-card number or the last 4-digits of a social security number. But it also gives an option to get a mail-in-ballot by checking a box that indicates none of those forms of identification are available. Similarly, it also allows the ballot to be sent to a different address than the address on the voter registration. One piece of information I would like to see is how many people in PA requested ballots without supplying id-information and/or sent the ballots to a different address than in the voter registration file, as that could be an opening for bulk fraud, assuming access to a list of voters who were not likely to vote. The number of voters in PA in 2020 is currently about 6.7M, which is about 700K more than either 2008, 2012, 2016 and 1.7M more than in 2018. I find it hard to believe that so many of these non-votes would be so enraged with Trump this year (and/or so thrilled with Biden) that after skipping the election 2016 and 2018, they came out in mass in 2020.
The motivation to commit bulk fraud in an election to determine who holds the power of the Presidency in a severely divided country is arguably orders of magnitude higher than the motivation to commit fraud in less important elections where small amounts of fraud are common. The threat of a prison sentence didn't mean anything to the people who regularly leaked confidential information from the Trump administration and/or his tax returns. For example, how many of those criminal offenders have been caught and sent to prison? It is pretty clear from the volume of false and anonymous allegations of Trump over the past 4 years that a great many people would do virtually anything possible to remove him from office. Is it illogical to consider the possibility that many people in this group may have found a way to vote multiple times against Trump and they didn't hesitate to do so? Is it illogical to consider that many TDS inflicted poll workers might have played sleight-of-hand with counting ballots and that small amounts of fraud by a multitude of people might add up to a large amount of fraud? Is there really a good way to prove/disprove anybody did this, given the limited ability/time for Trump to verify the validity of ballots and/or their proper counting?
From the perspective of God, the world only has two groups (believers and non-believers). But it has many divisions and many sinful people competing for power over others, and believers are not immune. I don't find it coincidental that the bulk of people who don't think there is a reason to suspect fraud in this election also believe that their power to control/influence American political policy increases if Trump is removed from office.
Of course the president should provide that information to president-elect Biden. Of course he isn’t. That’s the kind of person he is. He continues to show that he isn’t and wasn’t worthy of the job of president. And, yet, 70 million voted for him this cycle. SMDH