The Danger of Political Spin

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — Last week, President Trump attempted to use the mistaken discarding of nine military ballots two weeks ago by a just-hired contractor at Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County Election Bureau as part of his months-long campaign claiming mail-in ballot fraud will rig the upcoming election.

The Trump-Pence campaign on Friday used the same incident to claim, “Democrats are trying to steal the election,” despite the fact that the local Luzerne County government is controlled by Republicans and the county voted for Trump in 2016 by 20 percent.

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