As the Biden administration transforms federal agencies into a get-out-the-vote army for leftist candidates and causes ahead of November’s pivotal presidential election, the politically weaponized U.S. Department of Justice is doing everything in its power to keep records of the effort under lock and key.
The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) sued the DOJ nearly two years ago in federal court after several federal agencies refused to respond to the organization’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. FGA, among other watchdog groups, wants documents and other communications tied to President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14019 and the “strategic plans” it required federal agencies to create and use to “promote voter registration and voter participation.”
Zuckbucks on Steroids
Biden signed the constitutionally suspect order in March 2021, not long after the Democrat took office. It commands federal agencies do what legal experts say the executive branch does not have the legal authority to do: expand voter registration and turnout — using White House “approved” third-party organizations to help get the GOTV job done. The sweeping initiative has been billed as “Bidenbucks,” since it uses federal dollars.
Think of Executive Order 14019 as Zuckbucks on steroids, using your money to fund the leftist-led effort.
“This is clearly weaponization of the government for a partisan purpose,” Dave Craig, senior legal fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability told me recently on “Need to Know with Jeff Angelo” on WHO radio in Des Moines. “The executive order is not only unlawful, it’s totally unconstitutional.”
Craig is not alone in that assessment.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called Biden’s fiat a “grotesque insult to election integrity, on top of being unconstitutional.” As Paxton said in a press release in 2022, the U.S. Constitution “explicitly grants the power of election oversight to state legislatures.”
“Allowing political appointees at federal agencies to use taxpayer dollars to influence election efforts runs afoul of our election laws, basic fairness, and the desperate need for election security,” Paxton said in 2022 after signing on to a Louisiana-led coalition’s letter warning Biden of his constitutional overreach.
States are primarily in charge of determining the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections” under the Constitution’s elections clause. It doesn’t say anything about a president using executive branch agencies to “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process,” as Biden’s order directs.
Biden employs the National Voter Registration Act in rewriting the powers of the executive branch, but the 1993 law gives the president no such authority, FGA’s Craig said.
“Not only does the National Voter Registration Act not authorize [federal] agencies to do what they are doing, the president is not the constitutionally mandated authority in the federal government to execute this,” the attorney said.
‘Noteworthy Progress’
Biden’s leftist pals over at the ACLU insist not only that the president has the right to deputize federal agencies to drive voter turnout, but that he needs to do more to realize his “visionary executive order.”
“Building on its promising start, it’s time for the Biden administration and agencies to finish the job and fulfill the promise of the voting access executive order,” Ceridwen Cherry, former staff attorney for the ACLU Voting Rights Project, wrote last March.
In a report titled, “Strengthening Democracy: A Progress Report on Federal Agency Action to Promote Access to Voting,” the ACLU and dozens of leftists partners assert that “A few agencies have made noteworthy progress.” The short list of agencies the ACLU says are “on the right track” for federal election meddling includes the Department of the Interior, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program in the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
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In June 2022, the Internal Revenue Service released its Guidance for Promoting Voter Registration at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance and Tax Counseling for the Elderly Sites as part of Biden’s order. The IRS directive includes instructions to “encourage” agency partners to “provide … information to taxpayers” about “how to engage in other non-partisan efforts (such as outreach campaigns) that promote voter participation.”
What could possibly go wrong?
Shrouded in Secrecy
While some agencies have boasted of their Bidenbucks efforts, the Biden administration has mostly kept the public in the dark. Its feverish fight to block disclosure of the records connected to the creation and implementation of the executive order has election integrity advocates like the Foundation for Government Accountability asking: What is Biden hiding?
In July 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida ordered the Department of Justice to respond to FGA’s Freedom of Information Act request and “provide all documents required to be disclosed under FOIA law.” The DOJ finally coughed up 135 pages of documents, a fragment of the 5,500-plus records the agency initially claimed to possess. The documents the department did turn over were heavily redacted, according to the foundation.
According to FGA, the DOJ falsely — and condescendingly — claimed releasing the records, including a 15-page strategic plan to carry out Biden’s order, would only “confuse the public.” In the DOJ’s motion for summary judgment, attorneys argue “such public confusion would result from disclosure of the Strategic Plan because it contains many proposed actions that the public might construe as ‘future commitments, past actions, or provisions already in place.'”
The DOJ also cites presidential communications privilege, which it asserts is “presumptive,”and that it “preserves the President’s ability to obtain candid and informed opinions from his advisors and to make decisions confidentially.”
FGA President and CEO Tarren Bragdon said the DOJ is employing “flimsy excuses to justify concealing key information regarding their participation in government-funded ‘get out the vote’ efforts.”
“President Biden is deeply unpopular. It’s clear his administration has weaponized DOJ to hide records and is using the legal process to run out the clock before the midterm elections,” Bragdon said in a press release following DOJ’s filing.
A mediation hearing was held more than a year ago. The FGA still is waiting for a judge’s ruling on the release of the records.
“The president is acting unconstitutionally, the agencies are acting unlawfully, and they’re doing so with taxpayer money, with next to zero transparency for the taxpayers,” Craig said. “That’s something that has to be fixed.”
Listen to the full interview with Foundation for Government Accountability attorney Dave Craig:
