Democrats Don’t Really Care about Election Interference

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 20, 2024

 

Democrats want you to believe they are obsessively fixated on the scourge of interference in American elections by hostile foreign powers, by which they mean Russia and Russia alone. They seem incapable of acknowledging other malign actors abroad that also seek to influence American electoral outcomes, particularly when those operations are crafted for their benefit.

 

“President Joe Biden’s campaign did not reach out to law enforcement after individuals associated with the campaign received hacked material from Donald Trump’s campaign in their personal email accounts in part because they had not opened the messages,” Politico revealed on Thursday. The campaign Kamala Harris was bequeathed “did not provide a timeline of events” when asked by reporters to identify, presumably, when they received those hacked materials or the actions they took in response. “Similarly,” the report continued, “a law enforcement official familiar with the hacking incident told POLITICO Thursday that there’s no indication that the individuals associated with Biden’s campaign responded or took actions on the emails.”

 

That’s weird. Indeed, the Biden-Harris team’s inaction is rendered even stranger by the revelation several weeks ago that those unsolicited materials were pilfered from the Trump camp by agents loyal to the Islamic Republic of Iran. And it’s not just the campaign’s political principals in Iran’s crosshairs.  Trump’s “legal team” is also a target of this hacking operation, and the hackers are still pitching their stolen goods to anyone unscrupulous enough to publish them. As Puck’s Tara Palmeri reported on Thursday:

 

Like several other journalists covering the 2024 presidential campaign, I was contacted earlier this month, and again on Tuesday, by an individual peddling what appeared to be sensitive documents pertaining to Donald Trump. I alerted federal authorities, and I’m not reporting the contents, but the materials themselves confirm that the hackers, whom the Justice Department apparently suspects to be agents of Iran, have absconded with more than just the oppo files on J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum that have been disseminated to multiple news outlets. It appears that they may also have breached Trump’s legal team.

 

The Biden Justice Department is certainly on the case. The FBI and other federal investigative agencies are cracking down on Tehran’s efforts to “influence the U.S. elections process,” which extend well beyond passing opposition research to their opponents. “Hackers linked to the IRGC appear to have a broad mandate to collect data the Iranian regime might find useful for kidnapping and assassination plots,” CNN reported in August. Last week, a Pakistani national was arrested in connection with charges that he was dispatched to the U.S. by Iran to kill American political officials on U.S. soil.

 

But the Biden-Harris operation and their Democratic allies haven’t displayed the kind of apoplexy in response to Iran’s plots that we might expect given their garment-rending over similar, albeit less audacious, efforts by Moscow’s agents to influence American electoral outcomes. While his operation quietly pursues Trump’s Iranian harassers, Attorney General Merrick Garland holds press conferences warning that Russia’s state-backed media outlets are promulgating propagandistic fictions (gasp!) and corrupting agents of influence in America to promote the same. “He’s going to try to interfere in our democracy,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby says of Putin, because “he wants to sow discord and disunion here in the United States.” Hillary Clinton insists that Americans who spread, wittingly or unwittingly, Russian propaganda should be “civilly or even in some cases criminally charged.”

 

The imbalance is conspicuous. And all this is to say nothing — literally, in the Democrats’ case — of China’s (occasionally successful) efforts to subvert Democratic primary elections, infiltrate the offices of Democratic lawmakers, and subvert the Chinese-language information environment.

 

If Democrats were truly unnerved by the prospect of meddling in America’s elections by foreign agents, we should expect that the party’s leading lights would show as much consternation with the hostile powers working on their behalf as we would those who seek to undermine their political prospects. Perhaps our expectations are too high.