Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, some of the past week’s top stories from the intersection of politics and technology.
DOJ apparently hires election hacker
The Justice Department appears to have hired someone convicted of hacking election websites — just as Donald Trump and his allies plot ways to meddle in the upcoming midterms.
Democracy Docket described David Levin’s apparent hiring as one of the “most troubling” examples yet of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division hiring lawyers “who have taken extreme steps to undermine fair elections, as it rushes to put together a team to carry out Trump’s anti-voting agenda.”
Levin was charged with three felonies in 2016 after Florida investigators said he used a cyberattack to obtain credentials, then entered restricted portions of a county elections website, and separately accessed the state Division of Elections website.
Levin later said he had wanted to look into “the integrity of elections.”
The charges were later reduced to two misdemeanors. Levin pleaded guilty, served 20 days in jail and received two years of probation.
Now, images and video posted online suggest Levin has joined the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division — the federal office charged with enforcing many of the nation’s voting rights laws and that is now leading the Trump administration’s nationwide grab for sensitive voter data.
Democracy Docket also reported that Levin participated in a federal election monitoring operation in Minnesota earlier this month. The outlet said Levin and the DOJ didn’t respond to its requests for comment.
Read more at Democracy Docket.
The hollowing out of the local news media is a godsend to white nationalists. That idea was broached by far-right propagandist Kevin DeAnna in a video that surfaced from a white nationalist conference earlier this year in Rome, where he spoke about it in the context of targeting white rural voters. In response, I wrote about how the decline of local news allows bigotry to fester — and how DeAnna’s comments serve as a warning to white America with the midterms approaching.
Read more at MS NOW.
Trump’s reported Live Nation intervention
A new report from The Wall Street Journal details how Trump pressured DOJ officials to reach a settlement in the federal government’s antitrust case against concert promoter Live Nation shortly after holding an Oval Office meeting with the company’s CEO.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal.
Trump and the war economy
Trump’s financial disclosure forms show that his brokers made massive investments in the oil industry that are being enriched amid his war with Iran. I wrote about Trump and his family getting richer off the war economy, and I also discussed the topic on “Way Too Early” with Ali Vitali.
Read more at MS NOW.
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