Marsha Blackburn is getaway driver for Russian meddling [View all]

The U.S. Senate’s Intelligence Committee in mid-August released the fifth and final volume of its bipartisan and hair-raising report on Russian active measures to interfere with the 2016 election. This volume focused on counterintelligence vulnerabilities and threats. It should have been a huge story raising alarms about both President Trump and the forthcoming election, but in an administration featuring near daily violations of ethics and norms, as well as strong evidence of crimes, it was just another day ending in y.

Though U.S. Senator from Tennessee Marsha Blackburn is not mentioned in the volume (a Nashville attorney who formerly worked for her congressional campaign appears several times), actions she took earlier this year assures the Trump campaign is free to repeat its foreign interference playbook this fall. In February, she thrice effectively volunteered to be the getaway driver for campaign misconduct.

Senator Mark Warner moved to pass three election security bills via unanimous consent. Two took slightly different paths, but both would require campaigns to call the FBI if a foreign power contacts them and offers help. Another funded the Election Assistance Commission and would, among other things, require voter-verified paper ballots and ban voting machines from being connected to the internet (thus making results hacking very difficult). One by one, Blackburn objected—falsely bloviating about a federal power grab. Elections, of course, would remain a state function and insisting on minimum standards, especially for campaign reporting of foreign malign contact should be a bipartisan consensus point.

At the same time the third volume of the bipartisan Senate report was hot off the presses, making Blackburn’s move all the more galling. That report raised alarms about our country’s abilities to counter a forthcoming wave of Russian meddling. Further, only the week before Blackburn’s blocking move FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that Russia continued to be engaged in information warfare ahead of this November’s elections.

Read more: https://tennesseelookout.com/2020/09/08/marsha-blackburn-is-getaway-driver-for-russian-meddling/