Four years ago, President Donald Trump used his bully pulpit to spread lies about the election, leading his supporters to act on their belief in mass voter fraud and eventually attack the U.S. Capitol.
With days to go before the 2024 election, Trump and his allies are running a similar playbook, priming his voters to believe the election may be “rigged.”
In addition to domestic disinformation campaigns, foreign government influence operations, overseas terrorist groups and domestic extremists are all simultaneously trying to exploit the election for their own gain, according to dozens of pages of law enforcement documents and months of reporting by NBC News.
“We’ve been describing the threat environment as everything, everywhere, all at once,” the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, Rebecca Weiner, said in an interview, describing the overall threat environment.
ne major difference this time is that a Democrat is in the White House, and federal authorities, including the FBI and the broader Justice Department, have spent years trying to learn from their mistakes the last time around while arresting and prosecuting more than 1,500 Trump supporters for the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. They, along with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — no longer a target of the sitting president — are already preparing to respond to attempts at election interference, both foreign and domestic.
But federal authorities also caution that their role is limited by law and by typical practice, noting that state and local officials, not the federal government, are the primary authorities on elections. The Justice Department also, by policy, has a “quiet period” leading up to Election Day when it avoids taking public actions that could be seen to have an impact on an election. And the Justice Department may be hesitant to do anything that could be construed as political given the extreme politicization of the country in 2024 and years of accusations from Republicans that it is “weaponized” against Trump.
Attorney General Merrick Garland theoretically could use his own bully pulpit to push back against conspiracy theories about mass voter fraud once the quiet period ends after Tuesday or after the election is called, a process that could extend for days, even weeks. Yet, as 2020 showed, election lies can spread so quickly online that even media outlets will have trouble reporting out the facts in a timely manner. Moreover, Trump and his allies have spent the past decade undermining public trust in the Justice Department and the FBI, diminishing the rhetorical power of those institutions.
“There’s no white knight coming,” a federal law enforcement official told NBC News, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the posture of federal authorities in the coming weeks, after Election Day….