White House election hack exposed. Trump's election meddling continues.

Two former administration officials say that early in Trump’s second term, political appointees at Homeland Security asked CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, to secretly acquire a voting machine, break into it, and report what they found so it could go to the White House. The agency was told not to alert the company that makes the machine if it found flaws. That’s the opposite of how CISA works. When it finds a weakness, the whole point is to get it patched. The career staff were shocked. One of the former officials put it this way: “My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any election results they don’t like. This goes against everything CISA represents.” The staff told the appointees over and over that it couldn’t be done, partly because the specialists who could pull it off had just been laid off by DOGE. Eventually the appointees stopped asking. Why does CISA matter? Trump signed it into law in 2018. And in 2020, it was CISA, with the secretaries of state and the machine vendors, that called that election the most secure in American history. Trump fired the director on Twitter for saying so. Here’s what’s happened to the agency since. More than a thousand employees are gone, a third of the workforce. The next budget would cut another 700 million dollars and 900 more jobs. The administration declassified records that included private information states had shared with CISA in confidence. State officials say they’ll never share with the agency again. A Justice Department official called county clerks in Missouri asking for access to voting machines. Tulsi Gabbard seized machines in Puerto Rico, and when the contractor found nothing, the government dropped the contract. And CISA’s election security plan for this year came out on September 24th. Thirteen pages. Early voting was already starting. Arizona’s secretary of state told ProPublica, “I don’t pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does. And what they’ve done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.” Officials in one large county have met privately with their machine vendor to plan for the federal government seizing their equipment. So the agency built to protect the vote has been gutted, and the people who gutted it asked what was left of it to hack a voting machine and keep the results between them and the White House. Two weeks from an election the president’s party is losing, with a president who still says the last one he lost was rigged. Can we just imagine for a second if this story came out about Joe Biden? Two weeks before an election his party was about to lose? Trump would’ve called it one of the greatest crimes in American history, and for once he wouldn’t have been wrong.