President Donald Trump’s prime-time address to the nation on Thursday, billed by the White House as a must-watch revelation of election fraud and foreign interference, instead recycled widely debunked lies over 26 minutes from the East Room, according to a review of the newly declassified documents the president cited as evidence.
None of the hundreds of pages of declassified intelligence released Thursday night on the White House website supports the claim that any previous election results—including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost—were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would have changed the outcome.
The documents largely describe vulnerabilities in American election systems that have been known for years, and that election officials across the country have already tried to address.
While Trump alleged that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea can access and potentially manipulate U.S. election data, a National Intelligence Council report from January 2020 noted that because U.S. elections are decentralized and administered by states and counties, any breaches would likely be localized and “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”
Trump claimed that members of the U.S. intelligence community and others he referred to as the “deep state” sought to obscure evidence that China had interfered in U.S. elections.
Yet a March 2021 report by the National Intelligence Council found that Beijing did not attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. One senior official dissented at the time, saying China took “at least some steps” to undermine Trump’s reelection chances, but the intelligence community as a whole did not adopt that view.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington denied any involvement in efforts to sway U.S. elections. “China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S.,” spokesman Liu Chang said in a statement.
Trump alleged that China obtained more than 200 million American voter registration records between 2020 and 2024, including names, addresses, and party affiliations.
Voter registration data is publicly available in most states, and two former senior U.S. officials said there is no evidence Beijing hacked U.S. systems.
A 2019 government report described Chinese hackers targeting a wide swath of American society, including medical databases, social networking sites, and defense contractors—activities U.S. agencies have long understood China to engage in.
The president also claimed that the Department of Homeland Security identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in federal elections across California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada.
But the analysis was conducted using commercially available databases, which are less reliable than government records, and officials have offered no details about the investigative process used to identify those voters. The Bipartisan Policy Center has found that, in many cases, people identified in these audits are citizens who were incorrectly flagged because of outdated information or clerical errors.
Even if there are more noncitizens on the voter rolls than previously known, the documents provide no indication of a significant increase in noncitizens actually casting ballots. It is illegal for foreign nationals to vote in federal elections, and experts say it rarely happens.
The right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s database of confirmed fraud cases lists fewer than 100 examples of noncitizens voting between 2002 and 2022, out of more than one billion lawfully cast ballots.
Trump has dismantled many federal organizations that tracked and publicized foreign influence campaigns since returning to office. He has fired employees at the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who worked to protect elections from foreign threats, reduced an intelligence team that monitored election interference, and forced out the leadership of the Election Assistance Commission, a small agency that helped states review safeguards for voting machines.
The speech alarmed Democrats, who questioned the impact of Trump’s efforts to sow doubt about election integrity ahead of November’s midterm elections, which will decide control of Congress.
“Recycling disproven claims about an election that took place six years ago doesn’t strengthen our security—it distracts from the real work of protecting the elections ahead,” said Leon Edward Panetta, who served as secretary of defense in the Obama administration.
Trump closed the speech with a call for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require Americans to prove their citizenship when registering to vote and present photo identification when voting. But the legislation remains stalled in Congress, and Democrats said after Thursday’s speech that they would not change their position. “The SAVE Act isn’t going anywhere. Period,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.
Several major networks, including ABC and NBC, declined to interrupt regular programming to carry Trump’s address live. The president accused them of being “part of a plot” and suggested they should lose their government-issued broadcast licenses. Fox News carried the speech live, while CBS interrupted programming for a special report that aired portions of the speech and discussed Trump’s history of making false claims.
The documents released Thursday include claims that Venezuela conducted an experiment on Smartmatic voting machines that swapped votes in an undetectable way. But a declassified CIA memo from June said the U.S. intelligence community determined in 2006 that Venezuela and Smartmatic did not have the capability “to manipulate the outcome of elections outside Venezuela.” The report noted that when Venezuela manipulated elections within its own country, it was possible because officials had “insider access” to voting systems—access Venezuelan officials would not have in U.S. elections.
Smartmatic software is currently used in only one jurisdiction in the United States: Los Angeles County.
White House officials have framed the disclosures not as an attempt to relitigate past elections but as an effort to identify and correct vulnerabilities ahead of November’s elections. They suggested the information had been withheld from senior elected officials, including Trump, for political reasons during his first term.
The weakened federal election security apparatus has left states to fill the gaps on their own. At least 30 states have refused to hand over their voter registration data to the Justice Department, so far resisting litigation. Officials in some deeply Republican states have also objected to the demand. “Stop threatening your friends in Idaho,” a lawyer in the Idaho attorney general’s office wrote in response to letters from the Justice Department earlier this month.
A federal judge has also halted a Postal Service proposal that would have allowed the agency to refuse delivery of mail ballots in states that declined to provide their voter rolls to the federal government.
At his confirmation hearing this week, Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on a permanent basis, declined to say on the record that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had fairly won the 2020 election despite repeated questioning from Democratic senators.
“Tonight seems to be the ceremonial kickoff of President Trump’s campaign to interfere in the November election,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island wrote on X.
With like-minded allies now positioned throughout the government, Trump has increasingly drawn the nation’s intelligence agencies into his efforts to assert greater federal control over state-run elections.
However, the documents released Thursday night do not show that foreign governments manipulated any votes. Instead, they document vigorous internal debates over how to characterize and assess China’s activities—debates whose broad outlines have been publicly known for years.
Discover more from NJTODAY.NET
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.