A major conservative thinktank previewed rightwing efforts to overturn the 2024 election on Thursday, with a top official saying there was a “0% chance of a free and fair election”.
Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation, made the comments at an event in Washington sharing the results of a hypothetical exercise mapping out several implausible scenarios that could take place after the election. The outlandish scenarios involved Barbara Streisand being kidnapped by Hamas, antifa-BLM protesters taking over a detention facility and the FBI arresting Donald Trump after winning the election.
The effort was designed to muddy the waters over the threat to the 2024 election posed by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results and tried to overturn the 2020 vote. Instead, the Heritage Foundation, which is also behind the extreme Project 2025, wanted to suggest that it was Joe Biden who could try to overturn the result of the election, echoing the ex-president’s repeated claims that it is actually Biden who is the threat to democracy.
“President Biden is very well-positioned to hold the White House by force in the case of an unfavorable electoral outcome,” the report summarizing the exercise says. “The lawlessness of the Biden administration – at the border, in staffing considerations, and in routine defiance of court rulings – makes clear that the current president and his administration not only possesses the means, but perhaps also the intent, to circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president.”
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, has said Biden will accept the election results. “There’s no place for putting yourself above your entire country,” she said earlier this year. “That is a commitment from the president.”
But at the Heritage event, that reality was ignored.
“I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election,” Howell said.
Howell’s comments are notable because Republican officials are increasingly putting pressure on the certification process in several states, an alarming development experts say could be a major part of an effort to overturn election results this fall. For example, Republican commissioners in Washoe county, the second most populous county in Nevada, recently refused to certify a primary without any evidence of wrongdoing. Republicans in Georgia are also seeking to give county election board members more discretion to slow down the certification of the election.
The report identifies four main “threats” to the 2024 election. One is that the Department of Justice identifies enough civil and voting rights violations to interfere in the certification of election results. The second is that law enforcement officials will “arrest opponents of the regime” (Trump has actually pledged to prosecute his enemies). The third is that there will be organized violence to intimidate state and local election officials (officials throughout the county have reported being harassed by those who believe Trump won). The fourth is that the media will suppress information.
The misleading document comes as the Heritage Foundation has come under scrutiny for Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint that lays out radical plans to reshape the US government if Trump wins.
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James Singer, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said the report was an obvious effort to support an attempt to steal the election.
“The architects of Trump’s Project 2025, who less than a week ago threatened violence and still push lies about the 2020 election Donald Trump lost, are laying the groundwork to try and steal another election. This document is nothing more than an attempt to justify their efforts to suppress the vote, undermine the election, and ultimately another January 6,” he said in a statement.