It was easy to mockingly dismiss such a call when it came from Christine Pelosi and a handful of other electors. Bur Podesta was the chair of Hillary's presidential campaign. The big question is does he have Hillary's backing for this move?
Hillary Clinton’s top political adviser John Podesta said the campaign is supporting an effort by members of the Electoral College to request an intelligence briefing on foreign intervention in the presidential election.
“The bipartisan electors' letter raises very grave issues involving our national security,” Podesta said in a statement Monday. “Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed.”
Podesta’s statement follows an open letter from 10 presidential electors — including Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Christine — requesting an intelligence briefing ahead of the Dec. 19 vote of the Electoral College.
Christine Pelosi claimed that the Electoral College needs this briefing to function as a deliberate body in choosing the next president. There's not much reading between the lines required here.
What is Podesta playing at? The obvious game plan here is delegitimizing Trump. Podesta is enough of a pro that he can't seriously believe such a gambit would actually work. If it were even tried, the result would be a national crisis of a kind that I don't even care to imagine. And the damage would be severe. Not to mention that Democrats might not exactly care for that precedent considering their history of voter fraud in national elections. Should Electors have been briefed about Voter Intimidation by the New Black Panther Party for example?
But the flip side of delegitimizing Trump is legitimizing Hillary and her people. They didn't run a bad campaign. They just had an election stolen from them. The more they cultivate the sense that the election was illegitimate, the more they exempt themselves from responsibility for the failure. And if in the process they do serious violence to the perceived legitimacy of our political system, their careers come first.