Justice Department “Election Monitors” at a Maricopa County polling site in West Phoenix
E-Day is here, and there have already been two hilarious federal law enforcement faceplants.
A federal judge ruled last night that the Trump administration’s Justice Department “election monitors” can’t carry guns, wear uniforms, flash federal badges, or arrest anyone. So they’re basically glorified mall cops. (“Poll Blart,” as someone online wisecracked.)
The next faceplant involves me, the FBI, and Connecticut’s Secretary of the State.
On Monday, the FBI’s New Haven field office posted a brag about how “the FBI protects the integrity of elections.” But the post began with an unfortunate blooper, “Election day is Wednesday…”
You read that right: the FBI, in an official post touting its work protecting the sanctity of the vote, falsely told people the election would be Wednesday.
Federal elections are always Tuesdays! That’s been the law since 1845. Isn’t the FBI supposed to know a thing or two about the law?
When I stumbled across the post on X (née Twitter) just before midnight, I was amazed to see that the FBI wasn’t being ridiculed for it. In fact, no one seemed to have noticed it at all.
Readers who recall my history with the FBI won’t be surprised that I wasn’t feeling especially gracious and took the opportunity to blast the Bureau’s fuckup across every social platform I could think of. Thinking I had done my duty to make at least a few people aware of this hilariously ironic blooper, I went to bed laughing at the whole thing.
When I woke up, I was stunned to see that my post had triggered a minor public outrage. Raw Story, Snopes, IBTimes, the New Haven Independent and the Yale Daily News all picked it up. Best of all, Connecticut’s secretary of the state, Stephanie Thomas, issued a press release warning voters about “misinformation circulating on social media, posted by the FBI’s New Haven office.” Her invocation of a national security buzzword like “misinformation” was an especially funny twist of the knife, given the FBI’s penchant for the term.
The FBI was even made to comment, with a spokesperson saying only: “The post was removed once the typo was identified.”
Yeah, we noticed!
Both of these stories — the mall-cop monitors and the FBI’s New Haven gaff — depict the national security system as I’ve come to understand it over the past decade covering it. These guys aren’t all-powerful. They’re not even all-competent!
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing alarming about them. I’ve spent the past month documenting the real stuff: the Pentagon mobilizing against “foreign” election threats, Cyber Command’s Task Force Raider and its role in the midterms, the National Guard’s election mission, the feds’ planning for an election “doomsday”, the government branding a Senate candidate a national security threat, and the White House treating speech itself as election interference.
The military inserting itself into our election process is worth criticizing. But criticizing is different from panicking. The people running these efforts are the same people who can’t remember elections are on Tuesdays.
Fear is what they’re selling. Don’t buy it.
Instead, why not laugh it off with us in the live chat tonight?
