Sfrom President Trump he returned to office a year and a half ago, he has sent investigators and analysts from the American intelligence community to look for evidence of interference by foreign nations in the election that he lost but claims he won. In a speech from the White House tonight, the president sought to reveal evidence of his baseless claims that the 2020 vote was marred by fraud. But once again, he came up empty.
The president spoke for nearly half an hour, carefully linking reports of stolen voter records and software vulnerabilities in voting machines to fraudulent voter registration drives. But he never claimed that a foreign government had changed any vote, and all indications are that it did not. Earlier in the day, a White House official told us that after a thorough examination of “millions” of documents collected, the investigative team found no evidence to support the allegations.
Former intelligence officials expressed surprise at the president’s characterization of what was in the documents. “I’ve never seen raw, unverified reports pushed this way: harvested for useful pieces, made into weapons against an American election,” Julia Curlee, a former intelligence official who was among those who provided Trump’s daily briefings during his first term, told us.
Toward the end of a speech filled with more fiction than truth, Trump insisted, “We can never watch a rigged election again.” But he did not announce any steps his administration would take to prevent further interference, other than sharing more information with state governments, something the United States had done regularly before Trump canceled election security plans at the start of his second term. Trump also announced that he has no plans to try to commandeer the power to run elections that, under the Constitution, are controlled by the states. Most of those who rejected the choice that they have fueled Trump’s false claims he was hoping that he would declare a national emergency to somehow take control.
Trump made it clear that he believes the American voting system is not secure. The president’s primary claim is based on what he says is a new report released by US intelligence agencies, which found that China has obtained the voter records of more than 200 million Americans in 18 states. Those are staggering numbers. But they are hardly news.
During Trump’s first term, US intelligence analysts reported that Chinese intelligence had analyzed “voter registration data in elections” from multiple states. Former US officials told us they were aware that China was stealing or otherwise obtaining voter registration data, which can include a person’s name, address and political party. That type of data is often publicly available online.
China’s harvesting of voter registration information is not news. It was written in mental assessment of the 2020 election and presented to Trump and his top advisers, then deleted and released publicly after leaving office.
The assessment was unequivocal about the implications of foreign interference, including Russia and Iran: “We have no indication that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US election by altering any technical aspect of the voting process, including voter registration, voting, vote tallying, or reporting.”
This is not to say that China’s harvesting of US voter data is wrong. As US officials reported in 2020, it was part of China’s efforts to “predict election results and inform its efforts to influence US policy towards China under either election outcome.” U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts have acknowledged for years that China has pursued aggressive and extensive efforts for decades to collect personal information and other data about U.S. citizens. The goal, officials say, is to strengthen China’s geopolitical position by collecting as much data as possible that can be used for intelligence purposes. Current and former officials have spoken openly about their assessment that the Chinese government has obtained data on nearly every American. But that does not mean that the data was used to spoil the election.
It was just after lost that Trump seemed convinced that the 2020 election was not safe. In February 2020, for example, senior intelligence officials briefed him on efforts to protect elections from foreign interference and ensure that voting machines are reliable. According to a person familiar with the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share personal interactions, the president was so excited that he wanted to call a press conference and tell the American people that their election would be safe. That event never happened. In his White House speech tonight, Trump adopted a mocking tone as he reiterated what officials had told him and said publicly—that the 2020 election is well secured.
Former officials also told us that if Trump was not told every detail about the stolen voter registration, that was because the operation was just one part of a broader effort by China to influence politics in the United States. Trump now appears to be claiming that because he was not briefed on every aspect of the intelligence, biased officials were trying to hide the truth from him. But it is standard practice to brief the president on the results of high-level intelligence analysis and spare him too much detail.
Some of what Trump claimed contradicted the documents he removed. He said that U.S. intelligence had uncovered a plot “to mobilize large numbers to support the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela” and were plotting to “digitally steal their own country’s election in 2020.” But the leaked CIA report he referenced, dated June 29, 2026, said that while the Maduro administration developed methods to manipulate the electronic vote total, US intelligence “did not conclusively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was successfully implemented in Venezuela’s special elections.”
In fact, the CIA cited a redacted source that “judged the government did not need to commit major fraud to win the December 2020 National Assembly elections, given that almost the entire opposition boycotted and the government had already elected the leadership of the opposition party.”
Trump’s history of false information related to the election led ABC and NBC to decide not to broadcast his speech live, despite requests from the White House to do so. The president suggested that the editorial choice was like a crime against broadcasters. “Such fraud should mean the confiscation of their licenses,” he said. “What we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting.”
Prior to Trump’s remarks, his online allies had given their audience a shocker, raising expectations that he would fundamentally improve the way the election is run. Mike Lindell, a river company executive who has long championed election fraud, told us this week that he expected Trump to release evidence of foreign hacking of election equipment used to manipulate US elections. “The voting machine world is collapsing,” he said. Wouldn’t that be a thing? Are you going to write a big article that ‘Was Mike Lindell Right?’
Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence captain, wrote on social media that “all hell will break loose” after Trump’s remarks, which he hoped would create pressure on Congress to approve Trump’s long-term nominee. SAVE America Act. The bill would, among other things, require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a photo ID when voting. Trump called on lawmakers tonight to pass it—saying, “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is because you want to cheat”—though the prospects for success appear dim. Election experts say the bill would make it harder for people to vote and do little to prevent vote fraud, which they say is already rare.
Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and chairman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, summed up his reaction to the president’s remarks in four words: “That was ridiculous.”
The reception around Trump was very different. After he finished his speech, the audience—which included senior leaders of his administration and the intelligence community—burst into applause.
