Criminals or Morons?

Donald Trump formed a commission formed to investigate "electoral fraud" early in his presidency. Of course, there's no evidence whatsoever that there's any serious amount of in-person voter fraud (of the few cases found most involved Republicans). But Trump says there has to be because he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes.

A couple of weeks ago the commission asked all the states for confidential information on all voters, including names, party affiliation, addresses, birth dates, and even the last four digits of the Social Security number.

This is exactly the information that Russian hackers need to commit identity theft, allowing them to empty out your bank account. Or screw with the voter registration system in the states, preventing Americans from voting in the next election.

Did Jared Kushner want that secret back channel to the Russians so he could send them this data?

The Trump administration's plan for this data was to have the states upload the data to a server and then store it on "someone's" computer in the White House. Apparently, no consideration was made for the security of the data.

Just recently it was discovered that a Republican operative had left voter data for 200 million Americans on an unsecured server. Was he just incompetent, or was this the cyber equivalent of a dead drop for Russian hackers?

Trump's commission insisted they could be trusted to keep the data safe. They then showed exactly how incompetent they are at keeping people's personal details confidential:

The White House on Thursday made public a trove of emails it received from voters offering comment on its Election Integrity Commission. The commission drew widespread criticism when it emerged into public view by asking for personal information, including addresses, partial social security numbers and party affiliation, on every voter in the country.

It further outraged voters by planning to post that information publicly.

Unfortunately for these voters and others who wrote in, the Trump administration did not redact any of their personal information from the emails before releasing them to the public. In some cases, the emails contain not only names, but email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers and places of employment of people worried about such information being made available to the public.

Rule #1: if you want people to trust you, don't do the very thing they're telling you not to do.

Most states -- even the Republican ones -- have refused outright to comply with Trump's dictates, so our data should be safe for now.

But the question is: did these clowns intentionally release these details to get even with their critics, letting the Russians and Republican doxxers know who they should target? Or are they complete idiots, oblivious to the harm they can cause with this kind of information, and especially, how bad this makes them look?

In the Bush administration, it was always a question of whether Bush and his people were lying or incompetent -- about the WMDs, the war in Iraq, Katrina, etc.

But with the Trump administration, the lies are a given. They always lie. Over and over. They never tell the truth. For them truth does not exist: everything they say is just another scam crafted to sell some swamp land on a Florida sinkhole. As Junior's meeting with the Russians shows, their story changes five times in two days, and in the end they will still never tell the truth. Because, in the end, they're covering up intertwined crimes and conspiracies that go back decades.

So now you've gotta ask: is the Trump administration filled with criminals or morons? No -- why choose? Criminal morons it is.