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Election integrity has been a significant area of concern for many Americans since the 2020 presidential election – particularly as evidence of fraud continues to be uncovered more than a year later.
But as Democrats continue to smear anyone who dares to voice legitimate concerns as “conspiracy theorists,” a resurfaced video of Kamala Harris from a 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing raises questions about how sincere those attacks are.
The focus of the June 12 hearing, which aired on C-SPAN, was Russian election interference, but one comment in particular from the former senator is raising brows.
“I actually held a demonstration for my colleagues here at the Capitol where we brought in folks who, before our eyes, hacked election machines,” Harris noted when it was her turn to question the witnesses, adding that the machines in question were currently being used in many states but were not, in her opinion, “state-of-the-art.”
Then Harris directed her question to the Department of Homeland Security’s Senior Cybersecurity Advisor Matthew Masterson.
She asked, “Do you agree that funding should be prioritized for the states to upgrade their systems based on need rather than based on the size of the population of the state?”
Masterson replied by agreeing that he felt such funding was needed across the country “in a variety of ways” and that it could be prioritized based on where Homeland Security deemed the “largest areas of risk” to be.
When viewed in the context of all that has occurred since Nov. 3, 2020, the Kamala Harris in this exchange sounds vastly different from the one who, in a post-election interview with ABC News, confidently downplayed claims of fraud by stating, “the people spoke.”
The Department of Homeland Security also exhibited a dramatic change in perspective following the election, with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintaining that it was the “most secure in American history.”
So, why the change of heart? Perhaps the reversal had less to do with a dramatic increase in election security and more to do with who was in power.
As The Washington Times noted, prior to the 2020 election, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was still trying to convince everyone that the presidency had been stolen from her in 2016, claiming, “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee and you can have the election stolen from you.”
Although her aspersions and claims of “Russian collusion” may now cost Clinton dearly in court, there are many others on her side of the political aisle who seem to have changed their position on what they once deemed to be a “frightening” lack of election security.
According to NPR, Masterson himself left his position with Homeland Security following the 2020 election because he felt that it was “as smooth a presidential election” as he’d ever seen and that claims of fraud were “disinformation.”
However, as new evidence continues to emerge about what really happened on Nov. 3, 2020, voters can rely on one simple fact, and that is that the truth always comes out.