Donald Trump’s crackpot conspiracy theories about widespread election rigging have crashed and burned against the mountain of documents he has offered as proof of those claims.
The 80-year-old president, flanked by his intelligence chiefs and top law enforcement goons, delivered a furious speech from the White House on Thursday night, raging about long-running “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference” in U.S. polls.
“Great damage has been done to our country,” he warned. “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost.”
Trump, who has never conceded that Joe Biden defeated him in the 2020 presidential election, has done more to sow distrust in the electoral system than any leader in U.S. history.
His administration’s simultaneous data dump of declassified intelligence reports, which he has touted as evidence of his claims, contains assessments from the same agencies that previously concluded that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to sway the vote in his favor. He has always, and viciously, denied those reports as a Democratic Party “hoax.”
The president says he is releasing these files after many were “buried and covered up” by nefarious actors, despite his own officials having direct access to exactly the same information throughout his first term.
Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under the first Trump administration, immediately called BS on one of Trump’s claims in particular—that the intelligence community had somehow hidden Chinese attempts at voter influence from him.
“Trump suggested the ‘Deep State’ hid from him that China was trying to interfere in our elections,” Taylor wrote on X. “Maybe he forgot that we personally briefed him on the threat throughout 2018. Big mistake to make claims living humans can refute.”
MS NOW reported late Thursday night that nothing in the documents released by the White House supports the president’s claims that U.S. election results are “vulnerable to being rigged,” or indeed his long-running insistence that the 2020 vote was stolen from him.
It is worth noting that a clear distinction exists in the files between “influence,” which concerns efforts to sway voters in a particular direction, and “interference,” which amounts to any outright attempt to actually determine the results of an election.
Trump said on Thursday that the files show how, “starting during the 2020 election,” Chinese state actors executed “the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.” The intelligence shows China has indeed obtained huge amounts of U.S. voter data, and the network writes that “influence campaigns did occur” during those polls in the form of “social media operations by Iran and China aimed at weakening Trump, and by Russia aimed at denigrating Biden.”
Still, a share of the data in China’s possession appears to have been legally purchased from seven states, with some of it freely downloaded from publicly available sources. U.S. intelligence officials also concluded that China had not gone so far as to actually interfere in the polls by “compromising voting systems to alter votes and change an outcome,” and that even its attempts at influence had been “low-level exploratory steps” at best.
CNN added that “China has a long history of espionage like this,” and that “it creates a real possibility of chaos on Election Day” if a foreign adversary is able to gain access to “live databases and starts manipulating entries.” Nothing in the files shows that China—or any other actor, foreign or domestic—has actually obtained that kind of access, let alone at the level required to meaningfully alter electoral results.
The network notes that a National Intelligence Council report in the White House data dump did conclude that U.S. voter systems are “hackable by at least five foreign powers,” naming four of them as China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran. That same assessment, CNN writes, concluded that it “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome,” given U.S. elections are run on a decentralized basis by different states and counties.
The White House has touted a CIA report on Venezuela successfully “conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020” as further evidence of those vulnerabilities. The system, made by U.K.-headquartered manufacturer Smartmatic, is currently used in only one place in the U.S.—Los Angeles County. The agency report also concluded that Venezuela could manipulate its own elections only because it had “insider access” to the necessary systems, which it would not have in the event of a vote in L.A.
The Trump administration has also pointed to reports in the dump indicating that DHS suspects more than 250,000 non-citizens are registered to vote in a number of crucial states. CNN writes that the veracity of those figures is in doubt precisely because the analysis comes from “commercially available databases, which are less reliable than government data.”
Research by the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation indicates the risk of any non-citizens actually casting votes, much less in enough numbers to meaningfully influence electoral results, is vanishingly small—given the MAGA-aligned D.C. think tank found just 68 confirmed cases of non-citizens successfully voting since the 1980s.
Politico reports that alongside the data dump, Trump has “issued a range of vague directives on election oversight to the FBI, the director of national intelligence, and other agencies headed by controversial loyalists.” The president is demanding that those officials now investigate “how and why such crucial information was hidden” from his administration—despite staff from his first term insisting that it categorically was not.
Thursday’s announcement comes ahead of November’s crucial midterm elections, ahead of which surveys suggest that Democrats hold an almost 7-point lead on the generic congressional ballot. The president’s political opponents, electoral law experts, and advocates for democracy in general have raised the alarm that Trump may be planning to intervene in those polls on the pretext of safeguarding U.S. election integrity from foreign and domestic threats.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
