#progressive issues

Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, speaking at a December 2016 news conference in front of Trump Tower in New York, is overseeing a legal team's investigation of potential voting machine hacking in the 2016 presidential election. (Mark Lennihan / AP)

Jill Stein, the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate, remains one of the targets of the “Russiagate” investigation. On Thursday, Stein broke her silence on the matter and announced that she has completed the handover of emails and other documents to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which requested information pertaining to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Stein reiterated her strong support for legitimate inquiry into alleged corruption, quid pro quo deals, money laundering, obstruction of justice and other illegal activity in the 2016 election. She cautioned, however, against overreach and misuse of Russiagate to promote warmongering, censorship and suppression of opposition to the political establishment. To that effect, she warned, Russiagate is both a symptom and further cause of our current state of rampant militarism that is harming American democracy.

Stein cited the explosive conditions in Syria to illustrate the danger of Russiagate warmongering. She emphasized that United States-Russia dialogue is critical now, as it was during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, with diplomacy being the only effective pathway to solving the expanding threats of war, nuclear confrontation and climate catastrophe.

Stein observed that concerns about election interference—whether by foreign governments, criminal networks, domestic partisans, voter suppression schemes or other sources—are not diminishing as the 2018 midterms approach. The Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal adds to growing worries. As a result, she called for a nonpartisan Emergency Commission for Election Protection & Voting Justice to ensure the right of every American to “a vote we can trust—that is accurate, secure and just.”

Stein herself is overseeing the only known post-election investigation of potential voting machine hacking in 2016.

While providing documents responsive to the committee’s requests, Stein objected to requests for constitutionally protected materials, including the request by the bipartisan committee for internal policy deliberations of her campaign, the flagship for an opposition political party. She declined to provide this material, noting the request intrudes into the First Amendment rights of political and associational freedom that are vital to political liberty for all Americans. Such constitutional threats add to the dangerous current climate in which progressive political opposition, social movements and the anti-war community are being targeted with censorship, surveillance and political intimidation.

In a longer statement, Stein addressed her proposals to protect elections, civil liberties and democracy without resorting to warmongering, censorship or repression. Read Stein’s complete statement below:

We are facing a precarious historic moment. Democracy is threatened by interference in our elections, and by interference in our civil liberties. Likewise we are endangered by warmongering, rampant militarism, nuclear confrontation and accelerating climate change. To solve any of these interlinked problems, we need a functioning democracy and a voting system we can have confidence in.

As first steps to restore trust in that system, we are calling for a nonpartisan Emergency Commission for Election Protection & Voting Justice, as well as international negotiations for an election non-interference treaty. These should be stepping stones toward broader international dialogue to address other urgent looming threats that endanger not only our democracy, but our very survival.

Handing Over Materials to Senate Committee

Today, cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, our campaign has completed the handover of materials in response to the Committee’s request. The information provided includes documents regarding my 2015 visit to Russia to speak at RT’s 10th anniversary conference on media and international relations, an extension of my trip to the UN climate conference in Paris, where I also spoke with international leaders and activists. The materials include records of the campaign’s payment for my trip to Russia as well as longstanding Green Party policy objectives of promoting dialogue and diplomacy as essential alternatives to war, nuclear confrontation and climate catastrophe.

Interference in Our—or Any Country’s Elections–Is a Blow Against Democracy.

We take very seriously the issue of interference in our elections, as demonstrated by our continuing efforts to conduct the first and, according to public information, the only 2016 post-election examination of vulnerable U.S. voting machines, a critical cross check on election security that should be routine.

Interference in our—or any country’s—elections is a strike against democracy—whether the intruder is a foreign government, criminal network or domestic actor.

While Pursuing Concerns About Foreign Interference, We Should Not Ignore Domestic Interference in Plain Sight

Concerns about foreign interference should not distract us from interference in plain sight originating from within our own borders. That includes the actions of the Democratic National Committee, which biased its party’s own primaries, effectively disenfranchising millions of Bernie Sanders’ voters; corporate media that gave Donald Trump billions in extra free airtime because he was “damn good” for network profits, in the words of CBS’ CEO; or voter suppression schemes like voter ID laws, Interstate Crosscheck and felon disenfranchisement that systematically deny millions of Americans their constitutional right to vote.

New Election Threats Posed by Big Data/Microtargeting/Psyops Tower Over Primitive Russian Social Media Strategies

Recent revelations surrounding the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal underscore the expanding scope of election interference. The scandal represents a disturbing convergence of a massive data privacy violation with a “military-style,” “full-scale propaganda machine,” as described by whistleblower Christopher Wiley.

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