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In 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Congressman John Holmes that the Missouri Compromise over slavery was “a fire bell in the night” that “awakened and filled” the former president “with terror” as he “considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”
I am no Thomas Jefferson. But last month’s federal seizure of 2020 voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard personally present for the execution of the search warrant, filled me with a similar foreboding.
The 2020 presidential election was litigated in more than 60 court cases. Biden won. There is no evidence of foreign interference with vote counting in 2020, nor of any criminal conspiracy. Even if there had been a conspiracy, such misconduct would now lie outside the statute of limitations under federal criminal law. The clock cannot be rewound to elect Donald Trump president in 2020.
It was appropriate for the intelligence community (IC) to analyze its reporting on Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election and publicize its findings. But the KGB’s successors did not manipulate vote counts. Trump won in 2016 fair and square, as much as Biden did in 2020, and as much as Trump won again in 2024.
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