Trump Rails Against Election Systems — And Familiar Enemies

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 vulnerabilities in 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.

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 to investigate “how and why such crucial information was hidden” from him and prosecute the people responsible for what he claimed to be a 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 administration. But the documents 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 appeared to be a long-form pitch to reluctant senators to support his stalled effort 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. 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.

“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.”

Much of what Trump outlined regarding election security – from the vulnerability of voting machines to foreign powers seeking to target voter registration databases – have long been openly discussed and warned of by intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts. Even the documents themselves, some of which remained heavily redacted, reflected intense debates among intelligence officials.

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.

Still, his speech doubled down on his interest in proving election interference has been underway. On Thursday night, Trump claimed that the 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 China’s meddling involved not only “members of the deep state” working to suppress information but also China working to find and pay U.S. journalists to write negatively about the first Trump administration. The Trump administration is in the process of notifying the states who he claimed had their election data compromised by China, the president announced.