Trump aide says no emergency needed for midterm election security

Dallas: The man Donald Trump recruited to the White House to conduct a pre-election “government transparency” project says there is no need for an emergency declaration before the November 3 midterm elections, as prospects of the president attempting such a ploy diminish.

John Solomon, a conservative media entrepreneur who became a special government employee in June, was behind the administration’s release of formerly classified documents in July purporting to show widespread election “meddling” by foreign countries and a cover-up by the “deep state”.

Trump aired the claims in a primetime address to the nation, upon which MAGA operatives such as Steve Bannon openly called for the president to declare a national security emergency relating to the midterm elections, and predicted Trump would do so during the last week of August.

That window has come and gone, and Solomon told this masthead there was no momentum for such a move. “I don’t get a sense that people are concerned about election security,” he said.

Solomon made the comments on the sidelines of the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, and said he was speaking in his capacity as a journalist, not a government employee.

He played down the prospects of Trump trying to call an emergency that could restrict mail-in voting or dispatch the National Guard to patrol polling stations, for example.

“Nothing I’ve seen as a reporter indicates that that’s on the table right now. It could be,” Solomon said. “But there’s a lot of really valuable things that have happened to grow confidence in the election.”

That included a request to allow states to use a Department of Homeland Security database to check voter information against federal citizenship and social security records.

The Trump administration has asked the conservative-majority Supreme Court to permit use of the tool. The courts are also weighing Trump’s attempts to restrict mail-in ballots through an executive order and a new directive by the US Postal Service, although time is running out.

Solomon said: “The solutions that have been in place have seemed to grow confidence. But we’ll know on election day.”

MAGA activists such Bannon and his fellow broadcaster on right-wing channel Real America’s Voice, Wayne Allyn Root, have been building the case for Trump to declare a national security emergency before the midterms, in an example of what Bannon refers to as shifting the Overton window of what is possible.

“You will have enough evidence by mid-August to show that we have a massive problem,” Bannon told the masthead in July.

However, the documents released by Solomon’s taskforce, and Trump’s subsequent primetime address, did not generate significant news coverage or momentum for change, outside of MAGA media.

Trump delivered a cryptic response when Root asked him about the matter during an interview a month ago.

“Let me just say this, stranger things have happened. I’ll leave it at that,” the president said at the time.

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