This is not even real… the Attorney General of Virginia just handed every registrar in the state a 10 page playbook on how to treat federal election law enforcement like the enemy, and he did it with the election less than three weeks out and early voting already running.
Read what they are being told. Registrars can deny ordinary DOJ election monitors access to polling places, officials should ask federal agents to leave and call local police, and they are supposed to write down badge numbers, weapons, vehicles and movements while collecting complaints from voters who say the feds frighten them. Then on pages 8 and 9 they get coached to call attorneys about fighting federal subpoenas for election materials… and on page 3, almost like a footnote, Virginia has eliminated the ability to challenge a voter's qualifications at the polling place.
So let me ask you. If your elections are clean, why are you building a file on the people checking them? Why do you take away the one Election Day safeguard citizens had to question an ineligible voter, and in the same breath train your clerks to stonewall federal investigators? Honest people open the doors and say come look. People with something to hide lawyer up before anyone has even knocked.
And keep in mind who is running this. Jay Jones is the same guy whose own texts about a Republican colleague getting two bullets to the head blew up last year, and Virginia elected him Attorney General anyway. Now he wants your registrars treating federal agents as the threat while the bulletin itself does not identify one specific unlawful federal operation planned in Virginia. Not one. They are preparing for a fight nobody announced.
I have watched this movie in Colorado for six years… when the people who run the elections spend more energy protecting the process from scrutiny than protecting your vote, you already know the answer to the question. That is the rot, a state election machine that sees oversight as an attack and treats the citizen voter as an afterthought.
Make no mistake, federal law enforcement has real authority to enforce federal election law, and a state AG does not get to wish that away because he does not like who is asking.
@realDonaldTrump, send the monitors to Virginia anyway and make Jay Jones explain on camera why he wants them locked out.