Trump’s own appointees asked the government’s election security agency to secretly hack a voting machine and send the results to the White House. The career staff refused. ProPublica broke this story. Early in this term, political appointees at Homeland Security went to CISA with a request. Buy a voting machine in secret. Break into it. Don’t tell the company that makes it what you find. Report back so it can go to the White House. That’s the opposite of how CISA works. When it finds a weakness, the whole point is to get it patched. One former official said the plan looked like something they could keep in their back pocket to invalidate any election results they don’t like. The staff kept telling the appointees it couldn’t be done. Part of the reason? DOGE had already laid off the specialists who could pull it off. This is the agency Trump created. In 2020 it called that election the most secure in American history, and Trump fired the director for saying so. Since then a third of its workforce is gone, states say they’ll never share information with it again, and its election security plan came out at thirteen pages after early voting had already started. So the agency built to protect the vote has been gutted, and the people who gutted it asked what was left to hack a voting machine. I break it all down in today’s show (link in reply).