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Is the US intelligence apparatus preparing the public for future election interference?

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10 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Is the warning perhaps not what it seems? Is it an attempt to provide camouflage — a strategy known as ‘pre-bunking’ — for future election interference sanctioned by the Washington political machine?

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) together with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint statement ostensibly intended to assure U.S. voters in advance that the 2024 election that, despite anticipated attacks on the country’s voting systems that might make getting election information hard for citizens to obtain, election results would nonetheless be unaffected and election integrity would be maintained.

The FBI is responsible for investigating and prosecuting election crimes and malicious cyber activity targeting election infrastructure. The CISA plays a role in securing election infrastructure from physical and cyber threats.

The joint statement, however, has been met with skepticism based on the earlier roles of both agencies in past elections and their participation in massive suppression of conservative voices in social media.

As such, is the warning perhaps not what it seems? Is it an attempt to provide camouflage — a strategy known as “pre-bunking” — for future election interference sanctioned by the Democrat-powered Washington political machine — a.k.a., the Deep State — that wants to maintain control of the White House and Congress at any cost?

“CISA & FBI issue bulletin that upcoming cyberattacks may ‘prevent the public from receiving timely information’ about the 2024 election,” conservative commentator Emerald Robinson wrote on X.

“These same agencies told you: America’s voting machines were never connected to the Internet,” Robinson noted.

Jeanette Manfra, Acting Under Secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress in 2017 that America’s voting machines “are not connected to the internet.”

Manfra was responsible for the security of the nation’s voting system. Yet according to a 2020 report by NBC News, a team of 10 cybersecurity experts who specialize in voting systems and elections found nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to the internet.

“We found over 35 (voting systems) had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” Kevin Skoglund, a senior technical adviser at the election security advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition, told NBC News at the time.

“We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet,” Skoglund said. “And we knew that wasn’t true. And so we set out to try and find the voting machines to see if we could find them on the internet, and especially the back-end systems that voting machines in the precinct were connecting to report their results.”

Can CISA be trusted?

“CISA has worked with Big Tech corporations to silence Americans since 2020,” noted Logan Washburn, writing at The Federalist last month. “A congressional report from last fall found it had become a “domestic intelligence and speech-police agency” whose behavior was ‘unconstitutional.’”

Last year, the Biden administration blocked the release of documents “revealing the extent to which deep state actors and their third-party allies interfered in the 2020 presidential election by pushing social media censorship,” according to a Breitbart report.

“The government seems particularly eager to stop the release of documents pertaining to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the closely linked Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), both of which are under intense scrutiny for their 2020 interference efforts,” Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari wrote.

Bokhari reported in May 2023 on the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee’s hearing on the government’s “laundering” of censorship through NGOs and private entities:

In the runup to the 2020 election, the consortium created a system whereby state actors including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department could file “tickets” alongside news stories, flagging them so that Big Tech platforms could subsequently suppress or attach warning labels to them.

Beyond this blatant case of a private-public censorship coalition, the EIP also engaged in partisan politics, allowing the Democratic National Committee to file tickets through the system, as well as the Democrat-aligned groups Common Cause and the NAACP.

News outlets targeted by the EIP included Breitbart News, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Epoch Times, as well as the social media accounts of prominent conservatives Charlie Kirk, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Mark Levin, James O’Keefe, and Sean Hannity, amongst others.

President Donald Trump was also frequently flagged by the consortium, as well as his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

In April, The Washington Examiner noted the connection of CISA and the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks before the election, which no doubt had a big impact on the election’s outcome, in favor of leftist Joe Biden and against incumbent Republican Donald Trump:

On Oct. 14, 2020, hours after the New York Post published a story based on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that Twitter blocked from being shared online, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center reached out to “misinformation” researchers behind the Election Integrity Partnership, a collaboration between universities, left-wing think tanks, social media companies, and the U.S. government to thwart alleged falsehoods online in the lead-up to the presidential election. That outreach from the GEC, a foreign-focused office Republican lawmakers are investigating for its ties to anti-speech projects in the United States, was apparently thanks to guidance from the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to internal documents.

The newly unearthed coordination underscores the major role that CISA, an agency under scrutiny from the House GOP for allegedly colluding “with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans” in 2020, played in the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP. Both CISA and Alex Stamos, who directed the Stanford Internet Observatory, a Stanford University office behind the EIP, have appeared to downplay CISA’s role in the partnership despite some since-released records indicating a closer relationship than previously known, the Washington Examiner reported.

CISA and the FBI: paving the way for domestic election interference?

“With Election Day less than 100 days away, it is important to help put into context some of the incidents the American public may see during the election cycle that, while potentially causing some minor disruptions, will not fundamentally impact the security or integrity of the democratic process,” CISA senior advisor Cait Conley said.

“DDoS attacks are one example of a tactic that we have seen used against election infrastructure in the past and will likely see again in the future, but they will NOT affect the security or integrity of the actual election. They may cause some minor disruptions or prevent the public from receiving timely information,” Conley suggested.

“It is important to talk about these potential issues now, because nefarious actors, like our foreign adversaries or cybercriminals, could use DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) incidents to cast doubt on the election systems or processes,” Conley said.

“Congress is still exposing the extent of the detailed coordination platform between Big Tech platforms and the Censorship Industrial Complex,” noted Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, in April. “Rather than promote free speech and free expression, this partnership was dedicated to denying it to those it did not favor.”

Questions remain: Did government agencies facilitate cheating and lie to the American people in 2020 in order to drag Biden across the finish line? Are they preparing to unconstitutionally install Kamala Harris in 2024?

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Doug Mainwaring is a journalist for LifeSiteNews, an author, and a marriage, family and children’s rights activist.  He has testified before the United States Congress and state legislative bodies, originated and co-authored amicus briefs for the United States Supreme Court, and has been a guest on numerous TV and radio programs.  Doug and his family live in the Washington, DC suburbs.

Daily Caller

Scathing Indictment Claims Nicolás Maduro Orchestrated Drug-Fueled ‘Culture Of Corruption’ Which Plagued Entire Region

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Anthony Iafrate

Ousted socialist Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was the mastermind of a pervasive drug-fueled “culture of corruption” which extended all the way to the U.S.’s backyard, according to the scathing indictment against him, his wife, his son, and others, released Saturday.

Hours after President Donald Trump announced Maduro’s capture and removal from power, Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed the deposed despot and his wife, Cilia Flores, were indicted in the Southern District of New York on four charges, including narco-terrorism conspiracy, and “will soon face the full wrath of American justice” on U.S. soil. A grand jury found Maduro “and corrupt members of his regime enabled corruption fueled by drug trafficking throughout” the Latin American region, including in Mexico and Central America, and empowered notorious crime syndicates such as Tren de Aragua (TdA), according to the unsealed indictment.

Signed by Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, the 25-page indictment names six defendants, including the deposed Maduro, Flores, and Maduro’s 35-year-old son from his first marriage, Nicolás “Nicolasito” Maduro Guerra. It also names as defendants TdA leader Niño Guerrero and two high-profile members of Maduro’s United Socialist Party, Diosdado Cabello Rondón and Ramón Rodríguez Chacín.

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Maduro, “like former President [Hugo] Chávez before him[,] participates in, perpetuates, and protects a culture of corruption in which powerful Venezuelan elites enrich themselves through drug trafficking and the protection of their partner drug traffickers,” the indictment alleges. “The profits of that illegal activity flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military, and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top-referred to as the Cartel de Los Soles or Cartel of the Suns, a reference to the sun insignia affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials.”

The Trump administration’s State Department announced it was designating the Cartel de Los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in November 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a statement at the time the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”

The indictment also notes the South American nation “sits in a geographically valuable location for drug traffickers” and that, around the time Chávez came to power in 1999, “Venezuela became a safe haven” for them.

“In that environment, cocaine trafficking flourished,” the indictment continues, citing State Department estimates from arund 2020, with between 200 and 250 tons of the drug being trafficked through the country each year.

The charging document goes on to allege Maduro, his wife, son, and political allies had “partnered with narcotics traffickers and narco-terrorist groupswho dispatched processed cocaine from Venezuela to the United States via transshipment points in the Caribbean and Central America, such as HondurasGuatemalaand Mexico.”

“Through this drug trafficking, [Maduro] and corrupt members of his regime enabled corruption fueled by drug trafficking throughout the region,” the indictment continues. “The transshipment points in HondurasGuatemalaand Mexico similarly relied on a culture of corruption, in which cocaine traffickers operating in those countries paid a portion of their own profits to politicians who protected and aided them. In turnthese politicians used the cocaine-fueled payments to maintain and augment their political power.”

Maduro and his regime also “facilitated the empowerment and growth of violent narco-terrorist groups fueling their organizations with cocaine profits,” according to the indictment.

The charging document notably identifies organizations which collaborated with the Maduro regime: Colombian communist militant groups Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN); Mexican syndicates the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas; and Guerrero’s TdA.

The indictment also alleges Maduro Guerra, the captured dictator’s son, personally “worked to ship hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Venezuela to Miami, Florida” around the year 2017. Maduro Guerra is a member of his father’s political party and served as a Deputy to the Venezuelan National Assembly since 2021.

“During this time, MADURO GUERRA spoke with his drug trafficking partners about, among other things, shipping low-quality cocaine to New York because it could not be sold in Miami, arranging a 500-kilogram shipment of cocaine to be unloaded from a cargo container near Miami, and using scrap metal containers to smuggle cocaine into the ports of New York,” the document reads.

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Daily Caller

Trump Says US Going To Run Venezuela After Nabbing Maduro

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Harold Hutchison

President Donald Trump said during a Saturday press conference that the United States would “run” Venezuela until a “judicious” transition could take place in the country.

Trump announced in a Saturday morning post to Truth Social that U.S. military forces carried out a law enforcement operation capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Caracas early Saturday morning. During his press conference later that day, Trump said that the United States would also seek to repair the infrastructure of Venezuela’s oil industry.

“We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. So, we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,” Trump said. “So, we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition, and it has to be judicious because that’s what we’re all about.”

“We want peace, liberty and justice for the great people of Venezuela and that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country. It’s their homeland,” Trump continued.

Many Congressional Democrats accused Trump of illegally engaging in a “regime change” operation. Trump said that Venezuela could be “making money” once its infrastructure was repaired.

“We’re there now, but we’re going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place,” Trump said during the press conference. “We’re going to run it essentially until such time as a proper transition can take place.”

“As everyone knows the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could have taken place,” Trump continued. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

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