While they’ve been ratcheting up their exhortations over the last few weeks, the FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued another joint statement Monday evening warning about Russian disinformation about the 2024 general election. The agencies warn that the operations target swing states (duh) and strongly encourage voters to “seek out information from trusted, official sources, in particular, state and local election officials.”
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No offense, FBI, CISA, ODNI, but we’re gonna put on our cynical pants when we gather information from “trusted, official sources.”
The press release begins:
“Since our statement on Friday, the IC has been observing foreign adversaries, particularly Russia, conducting additional influence operations intended to undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans. The IC expects these activities will intensify through election day and in the coming weeks, and that foreign influence narratives will focus on swing states.”
What prompted this statement? It must have been something pretty major, right? Wrong. The memo cites one article and one video allegedly circulated online, neither of which I recall coming across.
The IC assesses that Russian influence actors recently posted and amplified an article falsely claiming that U.S. officials across swing states plan to orchestrate election fraud using a range of tactics, such as ballot stuffing and cyber attacks.
Russian influence actors also manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an interview with an individual claiming election fraud in Arizona, which involved creating fake overseas ballots and changing voter rolls to favor Vice President Kamala Harris. The Arizona Secretary of State has already refuted the video’s claim as false.
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If anything, these efforts would dampen Republican turnout, so it’s a little curious that FBI/ODNI/CISA cares, other than attempting to discredit a potential Trump win with links to “disinformation.”
Meanwhile, there was no mention of the potential for actual election fraud in Colorado because its lunatic Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, “accidentally” posted the BIOS passwords for the state’s voting machines on the agency website. If you haven’t already read about just how that screwup occurred, it’s an epic facepalm.
On Tuesday morning, Colorado Republican Party Vice Chair Hope Scheppelman shared the hidden tab discovery in a mass email, along with an affidavit from someone who claims they had downloaded the Excel file from the Colorado Secretary of State’s website and discovered the hidden tab by simply clicking “unhide.” The name on the affidavit was blacked out in the Republican Party email.
The passwords that were in the hidden tab are known as BIOS passwords and are one part of the security process for Colorado’s voting machines.
They are passwords needed to configure system settings.
“There are two unique passwords for every election equipment component, which are kept in separate places and held by different parties. Passwords can only be used with physical in-person access to a voting system,” a spokesperson for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said.
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Similarly, there’s no mention of the continual disinformation being spread by Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and their surrogates, who continually post verifiably untrue videos on social media and push debunked narratives in rallies and on news shows – with no fact-checking by the “journalists” in the room.
At this point, it’s all over but the turnout. So don’t pay attention to what ANYONE is saying and just go out and vote.
