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Trump’s primetime claims
President Donald Trump, in a primetime address on Thursday, said he would declassify documents he claims reveal “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” and ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute those believed to be involved.
Trump said the People’s Republic of China carried out what he described as “the largest compromise of election data in history,” resulting in China’s “illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.”
He also accused members of the “deep state” of suppressing information about China’s election meddling, and said U.S. intelligence agencies learned that tens of millions of voters’ data in 18 states had been “bought, stolen, or hacked” by China.
The White House released newly declassified documents alongside the speech, but ABC News reported that Trump did not provide specific evidence that the election outcome—or any votes—were altered in the 2020 election.
ABC News also reported that officials from both the Biden and Trump administrations said there was no intelligence indicating that voting machines or vote totals were changed.
Pushback and disputes
FactCheck.org said Trump warned of “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” but offered no evidence of widespread fraud, adding that the White House released documents that Trump said showed intelligence agencies kept election vulnerabilities and foreign interference a secret, while election experts said there was very little new information revealed.
David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research told a July 17 press conference, “The White House promised a bombshell, and they delivered a dud,” and said “There was absolutely nothing here that was news.”
NPR reported that in a 25-minute primetime address, Trump raised claims that the country’s voting systems are vulnerable to being “rigged and stolen,” without providing new evidence of a single fraudulent vote cast in any election.
NPR also quoted Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., saying, “The greatest danger to our elections right now is false narratives seized upon here at home as a pretext to convince Americans their elections cannot be trusted.”
NPR further cited a federal intelligence report released in March 2021 concluding, “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections.”
SAVE Act and next steps
Trump’s speech also renewed calls for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which NPR said would require Americans to show proof of citizenship to register to vote and was described by Trump as “simple.”
CBS News reported that Trump used part of his speech to pass the SAVE America Act, while the legislation remained stuck in limbo with some Senate Republicans skeptical.
CBS News said a White House official acknowledged that none of the newly released information would allege that any votes were switched or voting machines hacked, and it quoted Becker arguing, “The reality is: voter files in the United States are public.”
NPR reported that the White House released a fact sheet claiming more than 250,000 non-U.S. citizens are illegally registered to vote in four states—California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada—while also noting there was no detail about how the White House arrived at that overall figure.
NPR added that the White House referenced allegations of voter registration fraud associated with a Democratic-aligned firm in Michigan, and said state police raided the organization in 2020 while the White House added that “the Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation for years.”
