Election security is clearly not a priority
by digby
This is astonishing, but I suppose it shouldn't be:
On Friday, the deputy director of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) sent out an email asking employees to consider a “short-term deployment to the southern border,” ranging from 30 to 45 days, due to the “ongoing surge of migrants.”
“It is never easy to ask colleagues to take on extra challenges, but as DHS employees, serving the needs of the homeland is the cornerstone of what we do,” wrote Matthew Travis, CISA deputy director, to agency employees.
“If it is in your capacity to deploy, please give serious thought to volunteering,” he added.
Earlier this spring, top officials asked employees from all DHS entities to go volunteer at the border, according to a DHS official. The email went out because CISA is still working to send as many people as DHS Headquarters has asked for, the official added. In other words, not enough CISA employees want to step away from their cybersecurity work to focus on border security—at least, not yet.
“As we have consistently said, the Department is considering all options to address the humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border,” said Tyler Houlton, DHS acting assistant secretary for public affairs, in a statement.
“We will continue to work with our workforce to find dynamic solutions and funding to address this very serious problem. As part of this effort, it is our responsibility to explore fiscal mechanisms that will ensure the safety and welfare of both our workforce and the migrant population, which is also reflected in the supplemental request submitted to Congress.”
Among the officials who were asked on Friday to assist the federal government at the border are those tasked with protecting the U.S. government’s cyber infrastructure—including election systems considered vulnerable in the run-up to 2020.
There is no crisis at the border. To the extent we are seeing a surge of migrants, it's largely Trump's fault for insisting that we are going to close the border and build walls while punishing their own countries to make things even worse there. Desperate people are thinking they'd better try to save themselves now, reunite with families in the US and secure some kind of decent future before this monster cuts off aid and makes everything worse.
But now I have to wonder if maybe Trump and his henchmen aren't actually doing something even more nefarious --- using the border as pretext to hobble the efforts to stop election interference in 2020. That really is a crisis --- for the majority of the country. For Trump, the crisis may be that he won't receive the help he's expecting.
That sounds conspiratorial but sadly I could easily see Trump and Miller and some of his campaign cronies seeing this as a clever way to kill two birds with one stone. Don't forget, a super-hawkish Republican White House once sold arms to an enemy and used the money to circumvent a congressional ban against aiding rebels in Central America. It's not as if Republicans were ever above such shenanigans.
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