HuffPost UK
Trump Recycles And Distorts Old Intelligence Reports To Attack U.S. Elections Anew
Footage of President Donald Trump, as he taped his address asking Jan. 6 rioters to go home, is shown as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a primetime hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday, July 21, 2022, in Washington, D.C.WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump, who lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him on a near-daily basis, claimed in a much-hyped White House speech on Thursday that US elections are vulnerable to hacking and worse than those in third-world countries as he renewed assertions that a “deep state” withheld information from him.“Members of the deep state, very, very famous group of people, many cases, in our intelligence agency, worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible,” Trump said during 25 minutes of disjointed, often difficult-to-follow remarks from the East Room.Trump’s many claims, though, are rebutted by a declassified intelligence report released in March 2021, after the classified version was given to him on Jan. 7, 2021 — the day after his failed coup attempt to remain in power despite having lost his 2020 reelection bid. That report was written or approved by Trump’s own first-term political appointees.That report found that while China obtained publicly available voter registration information, it did not attempt to interfere in the actual election process. A minority view in that report states that China preferred that Trump lose the election to Democrat Joe Biden. The report also said Russia again worked to help Trump win, although not to the extent that it had four years earlier.If the speech had a stated purpose, it was to encourage Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, legislation endlessly hyped by conservatives as necessary to crack down on mostly non-existent voter fraud. But Senate Republicans have repeatedly made clear to Trump the legislation has no chance of passage.“Congress must pass the SAVE America Act,” Trump said. “How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat? The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat.”That left many Democrats warning the speech had a different, darker purpose: To create a justification for Trump to dispute the results of the midterm elections.“Trump and Republicans continue to lay the groundwork for interfering with the midterm elections in an attempt to cling to power,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement after the speech. “There’s one simple reason for this brazen power grab: Republicans know they’re going to lose the midterms. Americans are outraged over Trump and Republicans’ agenda of chaos, corruption, and skyrocketing costs and are going to reject it at the ballot box in November.”Indeed, the speech united Democrats in opposition ― all 24 of the party’s governors signed on to a joint statement condemning the address ― while generating comparatively little excitement among congressional Republicans, many of whom want Trump to focus more on voters’ economic concerns, which he briefly touched on at the start of the speech.Trump said he ordered the release of previously classified material that he claims backs up his contentions, though at least some of the documents appear to contradict or complicate his claims.In his speech, Trump also attacked vote tabulating machines as vulnerable to hacking — while neglecting to mention that most US jurisdictions use paper ballots that can be hand-counted in election disputes. Georgia’s 2020 election — which Trump tried to steal by coercing state officials into “finding” him sufficient votes – was hand-counted, and Biden remained the winner.Trump nevertheless disparaged US elections and focused on the SAVE Act, which would mandate voter ID and sharply limit mail voting, which Trump called “inherently corrupt.” Democrats oppose the legislation, arguing it would amount to voter suppression. “This is worse than any third-world country. There’s no third-world country that has elections like we have,” Trump claimed. “We have very important elections coming up. We want those elections to be honest.”Trump solicited and then knowingly and willingly accepted Russian help to win the 2016 election — but has ever since then loudly claimed that investigations into that collusion were a “hoax.” He has also tried to claim that other candidates took foreign assistance. Indeed, his obsession with the conspiracy theory that Ukraine helped Democrat Hillary Clinton that year ultimately led to his impeachment for trying in 2019 to extort that country’s president into publicly launching an investigation into Trump’s 2020 opponent, Biden.Trump did not in his Thursday night speech explicitly claim the 2020 election was stolen from him, although he did hint at it: “We can never watch a stolen election again.”That false claim has been central to his political identity since the night of his Nov. 3, 2020 defeat.As states continued counting votes into the morning — as his own staff had told him would happen — Trump went to the media in the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 4 and declared that he had won the election and demanded that election officials stop counting ballots. Later that afternoon, Trump posted a tweet “claiming” the electoral votes in four states, as if he were in a schoolyard calling dibs on playground equipment.“We hereby claim the State of Michigan,” he wrote.Even after enough states had posted sufficient results for news outlets to declare Biden the winner, Trump continued his lying, as he did even after the Electoral College had voted, although he soon after began demanding that Congress overturn that result when it met for the ceremonial ratification of the election on Jan. 6.It was that effort, combined with inflammatory language that Americans “wouldn’t have a country anymore” if they did not “fight like hell” to prevent the election certification, that led thousands of his followers to attack the Capitol that afternoon, where they injured 140 police officers and led to the deaths of five people.Trump managed to remain silent about the election for some weeks, but by the summer of 2021 was back to publicly lying about it again.Even after returning to office in January 2025, Trump has made his 2020 election lie a feature of the vast majority of his public remarks and question-and-answer sessions with reporters.He has also ordered investigations into the 2020 elections by his various intelligence and law enforcement agencies, but so far nothing has come of those efforts.Listen to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.Related...Liberals Rejoice While MAGA Freaks Out Over News Coverage Of Trump's Primetime AddressExpert Says Trump Will Have To Negotiate With Iran For The Sake Of His Legacy‘Put Him In A Rubber Room’: Critics Say This Clip Shows Trump’s Brain Turning To ‘Mush’
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