President Donald Trump on Thursday announced his administration is declassifying documents that he says outline vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems.
In his 25-minute speech from the White House, Trump described efforts by China to access U.S. voter rolls and offered details about long-studied risks with electronic voting machines.
But none of the information Trump described appears to support his long-running claims that the 2020 election was stolen or that ballots and vote totals were manipulated.
Instead, Trump issued a range of vague directives on election oversight to the FBI, the director of national intelligence and other agencies headed by controversial loyalists, calling on them to investigate “how and why such crucial information was hidden” from him and prosecute the people responsible for the alleged cover up.
Trump’s speech was in many ways an indictment of his own intelligence community, which he accused of shielding Chinese influence efforts from him throughout his first term . But the documents released Thursday night also reflect a genuine split among intelligence analysts who debated and ultimately concluded that China opted against a large-scale influence effort during the 2020 election cycle.
And in other ways the speech was the president’s latest pitch to pass the SAVE America Act, a wholesale overhaul of American election and voter registration systems rooted in his long-held grievances about the results of the 2020 election.
“Congress must pass the SAVE America Act – how easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat,” the president said. “The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune maintains there are not the votes to pass the legislation while some of Trump’s MAGA allies in the Senate have pushed to deliver it for the president by ending the filibuster.
Much of what Trump outlined regarding election security – from the vulnerability of voting machines to foreign powers targeting voter registration databases – has long been openly discussed by intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts.
The president didn’t reiterate his long held claims that the 2020 election, which President Joe Biden won, was stolen. While those claims have been widely debunked, his DOJ in recent months subpoenaed 2020 election records in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan.
The White House and its allies hyped up the remarks ahead of the speech, including the president on Tuesday calling the announcement “really big news” and press secretary Karoline Leavitt earlier Thursday encouraging the television networks to air it. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) said he was briefed on the speech, and called it possibly “the most important Oval Office address since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
In the days leading up to the address, the president’s long-held obsession with the 2020 election scared some Republican allies who prefer the president focus on the economy and not retribution. Those voices appeared to have won out.
“It was as on the rails as possible,” said a White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking. “The senior team just talked and prepped him. I think they explained the way to be taken seriously is not to be crazy.”
The president even opened his remarks by touting declining inflation and record stock prices.
Still, his speech underscored his interest in proving election interference was underway. He said the declassified documents gathered by the White House, and supported by top intelligence agency chiefs, show that China “carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history.”
He said, without evidence, that Beijing’s meddling involved not only “members of the deep state” working to suppress information but also China paying U.S. journalists to write critically of the first Trump administration.
The Trump administration is notifying the states that had their election data compromised by China, the president announced.
A review of the 2020 election completed at the end of Trump’s first term detailed some of the claims the president on Thursday said had been withheld from him and members of Congress. That report was provided to him and congressional leadership in January 2021.
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Though the report found with “high confidence” that China had not mounted an influence campaign to denigrate Trump’s electoral chances, it noted the dissenting view of a senior analyst at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who believed Beijing took “at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances.”
One document declassified by the White House on Thursday shows the ODNI official arguing over email with other spy officials about how to distinguish Chinese election influence efforts. In the exchange, the official also expressed a preference that his view be better reflected in the spy community’s consensus judgment, as opposed to the separate dissent.
The other official shot that idea down because it was not supported by the “relative consensus within the China-watching community” at the CIA, FBI, NSA and State Department.
Another heavily redacted intelligence document released Thursday said that a Chinese hacking group had downloaded publicly available voter registration information for six states “from a commercial website.”
Dasha Burns contributed to this report.
