Trump uses prime-time speech to allege election system compromised

White House publishes declassified intelligence documents on election vulnerabilities

President Donald Trump delivered a 25-minute prime-time address from the East Room on Thursday night in which he alleged that the U.S. election system had been compromised, raising questions about his 2020 election loss and the coming midterm elections, and pressing lawmakers to pass sweeping voter-ID legislation, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Trump said he was declassifying intelligence documents that he argued showed efforts by the Chinese government to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election. He also said his administration found hundreds of thousands of noncitizens listed on state voting rolls.

“This is worse than any third-world country. There is no third-world country that has elections like we have,” Trump said.

During the speech, Trump did not provide any evidence of voter fraud, prove that people had cast ballots in the U.S. who should not have or reveal that election outcomes had been altered because of interference, the Journal reported.

Trump and his allies have lost dozens of court cases across multiple states challenging Joe Biden’s 2020 election win. State and federal judges dismissed the cases, often for being speculative or lacking evidence. Documented cases of voter fraud are extremely rare. A 2021 review by the Associated Press found fewer than 475 potential cases of voter fraud in the six battleground states in the 2020 election.

“America watched the ramblings of a mad king,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said in a social-media post after the speech. “Before a single vote has been cast, he’s already laying the groundwork to rig this election and convince YOU not to trust the results if they don’t go his way.”

“Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue,” Trump said.

During the address, Trump ratcheted up pressure on Congress to pass the Save America Act, a bill that would restrict mail-in ballots and require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. The president has for months been pressing lawmakers to pass the legislation, but it has faced resistance from Democrats and some Republicans in the Senate, according to the Journal.

Trump said the records show wrongdoing by China, alleging that its government acquired 220 million U.S. voter files beginning in the 2020 election cycle. He added that government officials did not disclose to him when he was president these alleged attempts by China.

“This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare,” the president said.

A 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment found no indication that China — or any other foreign country — tried to alter voter registration, ballots, vote counting or the reporting of the results in the previous year’s election. Intelligence officials concluded that while Beijing considered mounting an influence campaign to affect the outcome of the election, it ultimately did not pursue it.

During Trump’s speech, the White House posted on its website dozens of previously classified intelligence documents, internal emails and investigative reports that it said showed extensive vulnerabilities in the U.S.’s election infrastructure. Among the records were reports indicating that Chinese actors collected or possessed large quantities of U.S. voter-registration data. The data show that at least some of the information was publicly available or downloaded from commercial sites.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is expected to visit Trump at the White House in September. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The White House posted a folder with eight documents related to Venezuela that Trump in his speech portrayed as proof that the regime of Nicolás Maduro digitally rigged the country’s 2020 election using methods that audits could not detect. A Central Intelligence Agency note among the documents said U.S. intelligence did not confirm large-scale fraud and did not confirm that the plan was ever implemented.

Trump also alleged that Russia, Iran, North Korea and other foreign actors have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.

In recent weeks, Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, and former conservative media commentator John Solomon, now a special government employee at the White House, have briefed the president on the intelligence, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump said in his speech that he is directing Pulte and the Justice Department to investigate and later fire those he believes tried to cover up what he sees as issues with the 2020 election.

Biden won 306 electoral votes to capture the White House compared with Trump’s 232. A presidential candidate typically is elected after securing 270 electoral votes.

The president asserted in the address that raw intelligence gathered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2020, “yet buried by rogue bureaucrats,” said that China had attempted to “manufacture illegal ballots” for Biden, and intelligence reports about China’s election targeting were kept out of daily presidential briefings provided to Trump.

He also lashed out at the media, arguing that NBC and ABC should lose their broadcast licenses for not airing his prime-time address live on their networks.

Trump said the Department of Homeland Security had found nearly 280,000 noncitizens registered to vote in federal elections in California and other states, revealing “just how vulnerable our elections continue to be.”

Those claims were quickly dismissed by Newsom’s office, which said California law is clear that only U.S. citizens can vote in state and federal elections and called voter fraud “EXTREMELY RARE.”

“Donald Trump’s Administration has repeatedly pushed false and misleading claims about elections. They have provided NO evidence to support these new ‘claims,’” Newsom’s office said.