Dahlstrom trusts Trump instead of the lessons of history
- Rich Moniak
- 31 minutes ago
- 3 min read
By Rich Moniak
Last week, the state’s Division of Elections (DOE) signed a Confidential Memorandum of Understanding with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice that should alarm any Alaskan voter who didn’t swallow the 2020 stolen election scam spun by President Donald Trump. It gives DOJ permission to “test, analyze, and assess” the state’s voter rolls for the purpose of “removing ineligible voters.”
“That kind of federal interference threatens our constitutional right to run our own elections,” Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Begich wrote of X. “The Legislature needs to investigate this immediately.”
Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who oversees DOE, disagreed. “Cooperation with federal authorities to ensure our voter rolls are accurate and lawful is not "federal interference," she wrote. “It's responsible governance and protecting election integrity.”
One only needs to remember Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election to understand “election integrity” doesn’t matter to him. Or to anyone else in his administration.
That Dahlstrom would make such a statement isn’t surprising though. She may not be one of the party’s cranks still claiming he won in 2020. But she’s never had the political courage to acknowledge he lost.
Harmeet Dhillon is the assistant attorney general for civil rights who signed the MOU for the Department of Justice. In a Fox News opinion after the 2020 election, she alleged there had been “massive dumps of improbably Biden-heavy ballots” and “long-dead Michigan residents” who returned their ballots “from beyond the grave.” And in a podcast a month before the last election she claimed “unelected bureaucrats, or elected perhaps” can change “the outcome of the national election — that’s what happened in 2020.”
Dhillon works directly under Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“We won Pennsylvania,” Bondi declared in 2020 before all the votes in the state were even counted.
She was one of the officials who approved in the FBI raid on the election headquarters in Fulton County, Georgia.
According to its FBI’s affidavit, its “criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen.” He’s another lawyer who pushed Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Olsen also prepared a memo “urging Vice President Pence to adjourn the joint session of Congress without counting electoral votes.” And he spoke with Trump at least once during the evening after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
So it's not surprising then that FBI used previously debunked claims of fraud to justify the investigation.
Christopher Krebs was a lifelong Republican who served as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from 2018 to 2020. Two weeks after the election, he dismissed the allegations of widespread voter fraud as either “unsubstantiated” or “technically incoherent.” Trump fired him soon after.
The current CISA director serves under Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. She too has never acknowledged Trump’s defeat. During a press conference in Arizona last week, she said DHS needed to “make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.” And lied by claiming votes cast by “criminals, hostile, foreign actors and illegal aliens” have been disenfranchising American voters.
In 2020, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen testified under oath that Trump had asked him to “Just say that the election was corrupt.” Rosen refused because there was no evidence of fraud to back that up.
Bondi would have probably complied. And she’ll likely help Trump cast doubt on the outcome in November if Democrats win the House and/or Senate.
Noem won’t let CISA refute any allegation of voter fraud made by Trump. Neither will the right wing news media. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Remember it was Trump’s false cries of election fraud that led to the insurrection. If he does it again, it’s likely there will be violence in some election headquarters and state capitols across the country. And because everyone convicted of violently attacking the Capitol Police was pardoned, his supporters this time will be emboldened by the assumption that Trump will pardon them too.
By trusting Trump and the shamelessly dishonest members of his administration, Dahlstrom is making believe everything that happened five was acts of true patriotism. That doesn’t do anything to restore the trust in the integrity of our elections that Trump destroyed. But ignoring one of the darkest chapters of American history is an invitation for it to repeat itself.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
