John,
No matter what the result of this presidential election is in the end, let’s be clear about one thing: it was never a fair fight.
President Trump and his administration did everything in their power to tilt the scales in the president’s favor, from violating federal ethics law to appointing a mega-donor crony to oversee the US Postal Service as Americans were preparing to cast a record-shattering number of mail-in ballots.
CREW released a report on Monday with the stunning finding that sixteen different senior Trump administration officials violated the law in order to boost Trump’s electoral chances in the month of October alone.
Their violations of the law go well beyond interviews and tweets. The RNC featured speeches from the White House and a naturalization ceremony performed by the DHS Secretary. Trump has turned countless taxpayer-funded events and press conferences into apparent campaign rallies, and he deployed cabinet secretaries to swing states to make the case for his re-election.
Even worse, Trump has leaned on the Secretary of State, CIA Director, and Attorney General to take actions to help his campaign, and the Interior Department has produced videos that can only be described as illegal propaganda films.
Read more in my new op-ed in the Washington Post, and share with your friends and family.
Any discussion of Trump’s attempts to use his power to win re-election would be incomplete without addressing the disastrous record of Trump’s new Postmaster General. Louis DeJoy is a Trump mega-donor who made changes to the USPS that a court found to endanger voting by mail. Just in the past few days, the Postal Service ignored a court order to perform sweeps for missing ballots in 12 postal processing facilities spanning 15 states after hundreds of thousands of ballots could not be traced.
We will never know how much Trump’s anti-democratic efforts to use taxpayer resources and government authority to boost his campaign actually changed the outcome of the election. But we do know that it cannot be allowed to happen again.
Americans should be furious. I know I am.
There must be accountability for the law-breakers, and there must be significant reforms. In order to achieve either of those things, there must be grassroots public outcry. That’s where you come in.
You can start by sharing my op-ed, and we will be in touch in the coming weeks with our proposals for comprehensive reform to strengthen and repair our democracy. You can also sign our petition demanding that every vote be counted, because if votes were not so important, the president would not be trying so hard to stop the counting, or to tilt the scales in his favor.
Thank you for standing with us,
Noah Bookbinder
Executive Director, CREW
