“electoral crime” A group led by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell sent emails requesting personal information from local election officials as well as information about security software designed to detect threats in those counties, according to emails obtained by The New York Times. Rolling Stone And American destruction.
Lindell is an active advocate for election denial issues and one of the most prominent voices in a movement that falsely claims that the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost to President Joe Biden, was tainted by widespread fraud.
On September 5, the Lindell-backed group, the Election Crimes Bureau, emailed at least one Georgia county asking them to survey the Center for Cyber Security (CIS), a nonprofit focused on cybersecurity, and the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to protect local election offices.
The survey asked election officials to provide personal information such as their home addresses and cell phone numbers. It also asked whether counties were using surveillance systems, called Albert and Falcon, developed by CIS to help counties detect online threats to election systems.
“The Election Crimes Bureau has been investigating the steps taken in all 3,143 counties across America to ensure the security of the upcoming 2024 elections,” the email from Lindell’s Election Crimes Bureau read. “In support of this investigation, we have attached a very short questionnaire for you to complete.”
CIS has issued an advisory to election officials about “CIS email spoofing,” noting that it has “received multiple reports of emails from [the] “Emails bearing the name ‘Election Crimes Bureau’ are being posted that may lead the recipient to believe that these emails are from the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center.”
The organization recommended that election officials instruct their employees “not to click on or respond to any links in these emails.”
Joseph Kirk, Barrow County Supervisor of Elections, confirmed, Rolling Stone American Dom said he received the message from the Election Crimes Bureau, although he says the email was in his spam folder.
He says he learned of the Lindell group’s message to election officials on Sept. 5 through a CIS advisory, and forwarded the warning to his county’s IT director. Kirk says the next day, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office sent emails to Georgia’s county election offices warning them about the messages from Lindell’s election crimes office.
“Georgia’s election officials are among the best in the country, and we remain vigilant and prepared to defend our elections from all threats,” said Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fox. In a statement.
after Rolling Stone American Doom contacted Lindell and his Election Crimes Bureau, with Patrick Colbeck, an employee of the group, claiming in a post on X that CIS was “engaging in a disinformation campaign targeting Mike Lindell’s Election Crimes Bureau.” Colbeck described the organization’s warning advisory as “an attempt to restrict access to critical information about the security of our elections.”
Lindell sent the post in a text message. “I haven’t followed up on this but I know that the Election Crimes Bureau helps secure our elections for all people,” he said.
He adds: “I'm not sure why the media is attacking the Election Crimes Bureau. I think they usually don't want to go to the hand-counted ballot boxes in our country. 132 countries have banned computers and electronic voting machines… The one party wants to keep the machines!!”
Lindell’s conspiratorial claims about the 2020 election have been debunked by a wide range of elected officials, watchdog groups, media outlets, and courts. In February, a judge ordered Lindell to pay $5 million to a man who refuted his claims that China was involved in influencing the 2020 election.
The email from Lindell’s Election Crimes Office begins with background on the Department of Homeland Security’s Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EISA), which was created in 2017 under the agency’s Critical Infrastructure and Security Agency. According to its website, the EISA initiative, which is supported by the federal government, “provides state and local election officials with a suite of election-focused cyber defense tools.”
The letter goes on to note that the CIS Initiative is responsible for “securing components of election infrastructure such as those under your jurisdiction,” before asking officials to fill out the questionnaire.
Lindell’s Election Crimes Bureau includes a fact sheet on its website about CIS’s Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center. The fact sheet links to a story published by Gateway Pundit about the Albert sensor surveillance system. The story links the system to debunked conspiracy theories that many election equipment across the United States is connected to the internet, making it vulnerable to hacking by foreign actors.
Similarly, in his post on X, Colbeck, the Election Crimes Bureau employee, questioned the idea that election equipment was “off-line.”
The letter to local election officials comes as Republicans are preemptively laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the 2024 presidential election in Georgia, which Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020, amid Trump's campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump has already been charged in Fulton County for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Winning the state is crucial to his efforts to reclaim the White House — and crucial in itself to his efforts to stay out of prison.
The Trump campaign has long viewed Georgia as crucial to the former president’s efforts to reclaim the White House. Trump, his conservative allies and other GOP powerhouses have spent years pouring massive resources into swing states to devise a variety of new ways to swing the 2024 race in Trump’s favor — with a particular focus on Georgia.
Trump personally intervened to force a Republican out of the Georgia State Board of Elections, sources familiar with the matter say. The new majority on the board — which Trump has called “vicious dogs fighting for honesty, transparency and victory” — quickly implemented controversial rules aimed at giving local election officials more power to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results. Officials across the state have already refused to certify results in recent years; now they are getting support from state officials.
Republican sources close to Trump, who are working hard on these anti-democratic operations, point to Georgia as, among other things, their “laboratory” for developing Trump-friendly electoral rules and policies that they hope to transfer to other states, or even nationwide.
This story is published in partnership with American Deatha newsletter that focuses on right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy.
