Trump avoids looking for election fraud in the places he might legitimately find it

President Donald Trump and his Justice Department have spent the final two years looking for consequential election fraud that doesn’t exist. Everything Trump has accomplished after dropping the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden serves as adequate proof that he cares little about election integrity, however a drugs-for-votes scandal in Puerto Rico is the newest proof of simply how phony these claims are.

Federal prosecutors had been constructing an election fraud case on the island, ProPublica reported Tuesday. And although the scheme reportedly concerned each fraud and drug trafficking, which the president has additionally claimed to hate, the investigation was squashed. Sources suspect that was a transfer to guard Puerto Rico’s Republican governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, individuals conversant in the investigation informed ProPublica. The pro-statehood Republican publicly supported Trump throughout her 2024 gubernatorial marketing campaign and through the 2020 presidential race, she was a visual member of “Latinos for Trump.”

As ProPublica reported, prosecutors filed “an indictment charging 34 inmates and associates with crimes including drug distribution resulting in at least four overdose deaths, money laundering and possessing a firearm,” however the outlet discovered that none of the voting-related counts had been included.

“Before the election, it was definitely full steam ahead,” one individual near the case informed ProPublica about the DOJ’s investigation into the drugs-for-votes allegations. “After the election, that all changed.”

The Biden administration was nonetheless in cost then, however these conversant in the investigation informed ProPublica they suspected that politics drove the determination to drop the fraud costs.

According to ProPublica, these prosecutors had constructed a case in opposition to a jail gang often known as Los Tiburones, or the Sharks, for promoting and buying and selling medication to incarcerated voters in trade for votes for González-Colón. Puerto Rico is one in every of the few jurisdictions in the United States the place people who find themselves incarcerated are allowed to vote, and Los Tiburones reportedly took benefit of that by threatening violence and selectively withholding medication from addicted inmates who didn’t comply. Four individuals reportedly fatally overdosed after utilizing the medication Los Tiburones supplied. Not solely had prosecutors “gathered solid evidence of election fraud implicating both inmates and staff,” sources conversant in the investigation informed ProPublica that prosecutors had been additionally looking into whether or not González-Colón or her marketing campaign performed a task.

González-Colón’s pro-statehood New Progressive Party received 83% of the inmate vote, in response to ProPublica’s tally of knowledge from Puerto Rico’s State Elections Commission.

González-Colón declined to talk to ProPublica earlier than it revealed its story, however in response to its publication, and with out singling out something ProPublica bought incorrect, she issued a statement calling the reporting “defamatory” and “a clear political attack designed to mislead the public and damage my reputation.” She additionally wrote that “any supposed federal investigation, if one exists, predates my administration,” which was a remarkably absurd factor to say. The query is whether or not there was a drugs-for-vote scheme which will have helped her win workplace.