Campaign Action
If House Speaker Paul Ryan wasn't complicit in suppressing information about Russia's interference in the 2016 election, he sure as hell is complicit in allowing it to happen again in 2018.
The head of a federal agency who has helped U.S. states protect election systems from possible cyber attacks by Russia or others is being removed from his post by Republican House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan and the White House.
Matthew Masterson, currently chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and a former Ohio state official, has been passed over for a second four-year term as one of the agency's four commissioners, according to sources familiar with the matter. […]
Masterson has spent the last year as the commission’s chairman, focusing largely on election cyber security, state election officials said. Twenty-one states experienced probing of their systems by Russian hackers during the 2016 election, according to U.S. officials. […]
"It is pretty remarkable that in this environment, given the importance of this issue, that the speaker would choose this moment to not reappoint the person doing the most work in this area," said Judd Choate, Colorado's election director and the immediate past president of the National Association of State Election Directors.
State elections official are already sounding the alarm over November's elections. They don't have the information they need, they say, to combat what the entire intelligence community is telling them—Russia is and will continue to be meddling in this fall's election.
But is it remarkable, or is it Ryan and the White House figuring that they need every advantage they can get in the blue wave that's coming toward them?