The Pentagon has been ordered to point military cyber and intelligence capabilities at threats to the midterms. Taken by itself, that is ordinary and both parties have done it. Taken alongside everything else this administration has aimed at the November election, it is worth reading closely.
What the directive says
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed the memo on September 22. It was made public Monday.
Commander U.S. Cyber Command and the Directors of the Combat Support Agencies will prioritize the use of DoW intelligence and cyber capabilities to ensure foreign actors do not meddle in our democratic systems.
Sept. 22 directive signed by Pete Hegseth
- Directs U.S. Cyber Command and the Combat Support Agencies to prioritize cyber and intelligence capabilities against foreign election interference.
- Directs the Defense Intelligence Enterprise to collect and produce on foreign threats to US elections.
- Assigns DHS a coordinating role.
- Requires all of it to be done in accordance with law, regulation, executive direction and department policy, while maintaining the fundamental freedoms that characterize our country.
The order says nothing about sending anyone to a polling place. On its face it is about foreign actors, abroad, in cyberspace.
This part is not new
Worth saying plainly, because the reflex in both directions will be wrong.
The NSA and Cyber Command ran substantially similar operations ahead of the 2022 midterms under the Biden administration. Protecting election infrastructure from foreign intrusion has been a standing military and intelligence mission since 2018, it has had bipartisan support the entire time, and there is nothing improper about a defense secretary telling Cyber Command to prioritize it in an election year.
If the memo were the whole story, there would not be a story.
What is around it
Here is the stack this directive lands on top of, all of it within the last few weeks.
- The Justice Department is sending more than 1,000 monitors to polling places.
- The Supreme Court let a voter purge database keep running without ruling on whether it is legal.
- Federal money bought political ads inside NFL broadcasts, now the subject of GAO and Office of Special Counsel complaints.
- Trump announced on Truth Social that the GOP will deploy an Election Integrity Army to every state.
- Florida announced 20 voter fraud arrests forty days out from the election.
And then there is what the president himself said when he was asked directly whether he would send National Guard troops or ICE agents to voting locations.
I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.
President Donald Trump, asked about troops or ICE at polling places
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said she had not heard the president consider sending immigration agents to polling sites, and also declined to rule it out.
For what it is worth as a matter of law: stationing armed troops at polling places is prohibited by federal statute, and has been since Reconstruction.
The BeezLoop Take
Give the directive its due. Foreign interference in American elections is real, Cyber Command is the right tool, and a defense secretary who ignored it would be failing at the job. Anyone treating this memo as inherently sinister is reacting to the signature rather than the text, and we are not going to pretend a document that mostly repeats 2022 policy is a coup.
The problem is that the memo does not exist by itself, and neither does the reader. In one month an American voter has been told that federal monitors will be at their polling place, that a purge database will be running against their registration, that their tax money is buying the president’s ads, that a party-run Election Integrity Army is coming to their state, and that the president will do anything necessary. Each item has a defense. The cumulative message to somebody deciding whether voting is worth the trip is not ambiguous, and a message like that does not need to be illegal to do its work.
The troops question is where we would draw a hard line, and where the administration keeps declining to. Stationing armed troops at polls is barred by federal law, full stop, and this is not a close call or a novel theory. A president asked about it has one correct answer, which is no. Answering “anything necessary” twice is not a slip of the tongue. It is the deliberate preservation of an option that Congress removed from the table in the 1870s for reasons that are not difficult to look up.
We would apply this evenly and want that on the record. If a Democratic administration ran federal ads during football games, sent a thousand DOJ monitors into red counties and declined to rule out troops at polls, we would write the identical piece, and the people currently untroubled would be writing it with us. The test for an election-integrity measure is whether you would accept it from the other party running it against your voters.
The honest read on the Hegseth memo specifically is that it is the least alarming thing on the list, and that saying so matters. Spending outrage on the defensible item is how you run out of credibility before the item that actually breaks something.
The question
If the cyber directive is genuinely routine, why has the administration spent September stacking everything else on top of it? And why will nobody in the White House simply say that troops will not be at polling places?
More: whether anyone can verify Trump’s own follower counts.
Sources: The Hill · Axios · Department of War release · CNN on troops and ICE at polls · NPR
