Jennica Pounds, the Utah software engineer behind the DataRepublican account, has used leaked recordings and documents to link former USAID officials and a network of retired national-security figures to contingency planning for a possible legitimacy crisis around the November 3 midterm elections. The material does not establish a CIA role, nor does it identify the roughly 10 current and former national-security officials described in an October 20 Washington Post report. That report said the unnamed group had been advising officials in 10 states and congressional staff from both parties on how to respond if the Trump administration interfered with the vote, including through troops or immigration agents at polling places, or attempts to nullify results.
Pounds responded by asking whether people in her files were among the Post’s unnamed advisers. She alleged that former USAID officials were working with others to “rewrite the Constitution,” and cast the activity as a covert project preparing for a political rupture. Her post coincided with the release of her book, Unelected, and formed part of her continuing “Democracy Files” series.
She says she obtained thousands of transcripts, hundreds of recordings and about 250 gigabytes of material, some scraped from online systems. She has not published the full archive, citing legal constraints. In her video, Pounds acknowledged that the Post did not name the group and that any identification drawn from her files was not confirmed.
A public election-intervention toolkit
One part of the story is not secret. National Security Leaders for America, a nonpartisan 501(c)(4) founded in 2021 and led by retired Rear Adm. Michael E.
Smith, has publicly issued a toolkit titled Managing Potential Military Intervention in the Midterm Elections. NSL4A says it developed the document with national organisations working under the aegis of the Horizons Project for mayors, election administrators, police, lawyers and community leaders. It considers two exceptional scenarios: military deployment after invocation of the Insurrection Act during civil unrest, and deployment after a claimed foreign attack or interference involving voting systems.
The group says the purpose is to protect voter access, public order and ballot custody rather than to predict military intervention. Smith described the work in an October 14 Zoom recording published by Pounds as an effort to protect the process, not secure a partisan outcome. The recording’s full context has not been established.
The Washington Post’s account gives the precautionary work a sharper political setting. The White House spokesperson Lauren Bis told the newspaper that the administration was acting to protect elections, including through election-crime prosecutions and infrastructure security. But Tammy Patrick of the National Association of Election Officials said the prospect of federal interference had become election officials’ dominant concern.
Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, told the Post that threats were now “mostly from our own government.”
Former USAID officials in a renewal movement
Pounds’s files also focus on Renew to Thrive and Renew American Democracy, associated with Danielle Reiff and Paul Zeitz. Reiff previously worked at USAID, while published biographies describe Zeitz as a former USAID adviser. Their public writing advocates democratic renewal, citizens’ assemblies and constitutional reform.
In an audio recording attributed by Pounds to an August 13 Renew American Democracy call, Reiff discussed the prospect that the federal government could lose legitimacy and described a crisis as an opening for structural reform and a “refounding moment.” Zeitz discussed an options memo considering what might follow if the federal government were deemed illegitimate and governors assumed a leading governing role. He also said, in the recording, that the idea was not secession. Reiff’s own public writing argues for renewing American self-government before political violence or institutional collapse forces the issue.
That is a radical constitutional ambition, but it is not itself evidence of a plan for illegal action. Pounds argues that these discussions fit into a wider structure she calls the United Democracy Alliance, which she says directs groups including 50501, Indivisible and No Kings and determines protest timing. The available material does not independently establish such a command structure, planned violence or a CIA connection.
The central dispute is over the word “illegitimacy.” Pounds presents the framework as a trigger for resistance if Republicans win too many elections. The documents she released, however, refer more specifically to manipulated or suppressed elections, results overturned outside legal procedures, defiance of courts and military force used against voters. John Mongan, a former State Department official, said in another recording published by Pounds that he had shared material with governors’ offices in Massachusetts, California and Illinois, and that California and Illinois had shown interest.
Those remain Mongan’s recorded assertions. The Post’s advisers, meanwhile, remain unnamed.
DataRepublican’s material exposes a real ecosystem of election-crisis planning; it does not yet prove the clandestine command structure she alleges. That distinction matters as the midterms approach.
The question raised by the recordings is not whether officials and activists are preparing for an election emergency — much of that preparation is public — but whether contingency planning for federal interference can remain credible when it is easily recast as a plan to create the crisis it anticipates.