ICE-watchers-turned-poll-watchers are preparing for the worst, as the Trump administration hints at potential strategies to disrupt the midterm elections. The post They Trained to Protect Immigrants From ICE. Now They’re Prepping to Defend the Midterm Elections.
Page A2From§Eachthe late evening edition — 28 September 2026
Pentagon a former secretary calls 'dysfunctional' ordered to deploy cyber weapons guarding the midterms.
As it ran on the front
Pete Hegseth's order arrived last week in the bloodless language of a memo: prioritize "advanced intelligence and cyber capabilities," deploy Cyber Command and the combat support agencies to "track down, disrupt and neutralize" foreign actors threatening the 2026 midterms, all while "maintaining the fundamental freedoms that characterize our country." Read straight, it is a promise. Read against everything else that has happened inside the building issuing it, it stops sounding like one.
Start with the man who used to run the Air Force. Frank Kendall III told CNN's Kaitlan Collins on Sept. The same week, the Washington Examiner reported that Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll had resigned, and that Hegseth's own allies were divided over whether Driscoll had ever been aligned with the secretary's "radical transformation" of the department's culture. This is the building now told to "prioritize" the defense of a national election.…
…(cont) None of this requires a conspiracy. It requires only that the reader hold two true sentences at once: the Pentagon says it will protect the election, and the former secretary of one of its own branches says the Pentagon cannot currently run itself. The Federalist's morgue entry insists foreign election interference is a complaint Democrats invented in 2016 and then ignored when it suited them. Fine — put the politics aside. Whether the threat is real or theater, someone still has to answer for who is deploying "cyber capabilities" against it, on whose authority, against which targets. Right now that someone is a five-sided building a former secretary just called broken, weeks before voters go to the polls, with no accounting yet of what "prioritize" costs or who signs off on the list.
The freedoms the memo promises to protect are the same ones that make it fair to ask who is watching the watchers. So far, the order does not say.
“You don't put the guy who just crashed the car in charge of the neighborhood watch, but here we are: the department a former Air Force secretary calls dysfunctional gets handed the keys to guarding the election. Meanwhile the actual watching — the ICE-tracker types who noticed something was wrong and did something about it on their own time — that's happening in some volunteer's group chat, not the five-sided building with the budget. The dysfunction isn't a bug, it's the cover story for who gets to decide what "foreign actor" means in November.”
“Look, this is a Secretary of Defense doing exactly what a Secretary of Defense should do — protecting an election from foreign interference, full stop, that's not controversial, that's the job. The Kendall stuff, the Driscoll resignation — those are personnel matters, totally unrelated to — well, I mean, Cyber Command reports through the same chain Kendall's talking about, so it's not entirely — okay, it's the same building, but "dysfunctional" is just one former official's opinion, it's not like the department is, uh — did I just say the department guarding the election might not be able to run itself? That's not what I meant. Next question.”
The receipts
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
Hegseth instructs Pentagon to defend 2026 elections from ‘foreign actors’Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instructed the Pentagon last week to prioritize and deploy “advanced intelligence and cyber capabilities” to track down, disrupt and neutralize “foreign actors to protect the 2026 midterm elections" while “maintaining the fundamental freedoms that characterize our country.” “Commander U.S.
· Democrats Warned About Foreign Election Interference Then Hired Foreign Nationals from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
· Hegseth allies believe he and Driscoll were not aligned on ‘radical transformation’ of Pentagon’s culture from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Former Air Force secretary: Hegseth's Pentagon 'dysfunctional' from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.