In a sweeping cover-up effort, President Biden's administration is pulling out all the stops to ensure that no one – the public, lawmakers or media – ever finds out what his so-called "voter access" executive order is up to. In this, the first of a three-part series on the cover-up, CNSNews examines how the Biden administration is working to keep the public in the dark.
Dubbed “Bidenbucks” by concerned citizens who suspect that Biden is using taxpayer money to further his campaign for reelection, Biden’s 2021 Executive Order 14019 is allegedly about “Promoting Access to Voting.”
The Biden administration has been fiercely resisting virtually all demands for transparency, particularly by steadfastly denying Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, even waging court battles to prevent information from becoming public.
Even though it promotes the executive order as a benign initiative, the Biden administration is taking extraordinary measures – such as invoking executive privilege – in order to cloak its voter registration plan. Separately, the administration is actually fighting a lawsuit seeking to derail the executive order all the way to the brink of the Supreme Court.
In its efforts to keep Bidenbucks shrouded in secrecy, the administration has invoked presidential privilege on at least two occasions, one involving a FOIA lawsuit by a watchdog organization, The Daily Signal reports:
“[T]he Justice Department has invoked presidential privilege to shield documents about Biden’s order in a public records lawsuit brought by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a watchdog group.”
Voter integrity groups like America First Legal Foundation have also filed lawsuits attempting to obtain information about the Bidenbucks scheme, the Heritage Oversight Project (which has filed its own FOIA lawsuit) reports.
Even when the Biden Administration does provide documents in response to an information request about the Bidenbucks executive order, the documents are outrageously redacted. In at least one case, all but two words (“This is”) in the communication were blacked out.
Information about the USDA’s involvement in Bidenbucks is of particular interest due to concerns that the agency is focusing voter registration efforts on predominantly Democrat voter groups like Welfare recipients, by issuing letters to the state agencies that administer SNAP and WIC programs, instructing them to carry out voter-registration activities with federal funds.
The Biden administration is also refusing to be transparent about a “listening session” exclusively with partisan, far-left organizations held to discuss the executive order, as RealClearInvestigations explains:
“In ongoing FOIA litigation against the Justice Department, the Foundation for Government Accountability obtained an email between the White House Counsel’s Office and numerous agency officials regarding a July 2021 ‘Agency Listening Session’ apparently led by ‘Civil and Voting Rights Organizations.’ The email includes a roster of ‘advocates.’”
Among the numerous progressive organizations participating in the meeting were several infamously partisan groups:
Aside from this partial list of left-wing attendees, virtually nothing is known about what took place at the session, despite the multiple requests and lawsuits prompted by the Biden administration’s secrecy. Details of the session are important, because Biden’s executive order says that federal agencies should partner with “nonpartisan” third parties – which all of the groups attending the meeting clearly were not.
The administration’s obstinate efforts to cover up details about Pres. Biden’s controversial executive order raise several serious questions, including:
One driving force behind the administration’s cover-up appears to be that Biden’s executive order could well be breaking the law, as more than a dozen state attorneys general, along with other critics of Biden’s executive order, have warned.
The Hatch Act, which prohibits the government from electioneering, is just one of the laws the executive order may be violating, the attorneys general explained in a September 28, 2022 letter to Pres. Biden urging him to rescind his mandate.
In response to at least one FOIA request, the White House has actually invoked attorney-client privilege in order to avoid transparency.
Additionally, several congressional Republicans have joined the state attorneys general and government watchdog groups expressing concern that Executive Order 14019 has federal agencies and employees engaging in electioneering and other partisan political activity, in violation of laws such as the Hatch Act.
But, until the Biden administration decides – or is forced – to cease its cover-up of the details of its Bidenbucks scheme, it would be hard to prove whether or not laws have been broken.
In Part 2, CNSNews will examine the Biden Administration’s efforts to prevent lawmakers from uncovering the details of the executive order's implementation.