Donald Trump is switching tactics to gin up public support for his efforts to meddle with the 2026 midterms by claiming that foreign governments meddled in the 2020 election. He ‘s right, but not in the way he thinks.
The president delivered a garbled
primetime speech on Thursday night in which he demanded that Congress revive efforts to pass the “SAVE America Act,” an election “reform” bill that would institute strict documentary proof of citizenship requirements to vote. The legislation narrowly made its way through the House, and has languished in the Senate for months now. If passed, the SAVE Act would disenfranchise millions of voters just months before a critical midterm election in which Republicans are expected to lose at least one chamber of Congress. Trump has refashioned the legislation as the “SAVE and Protect” Act, asserting that China had attempted to influence American elections and gained access to over 220 million voter files.
Both of those claims are misleading, as China’s election interference has largely been contained to efforts to sway public opinion on the Trump administration, and the intelligence community has known for years that China has been collecting publicly available voter data from various states. He also alleged that American intelligence agencies had hidden evidence of foreign election interference from him, and published a tranche of declassified documents as supposed proof.
The thing is, the documents do provide proof that a foreign government attempted to directly interfere in the election. However, it was not by China, but by the Russian government — on behalf of president Trump’s 2020 election bid.
Anyone who’s been paying attention to politics in the last decade will recall that President Trump and his allies have remained adamant that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were nothing more than a deep state “hoax” — dubbed Russiagate — used to malign him and his movement. Denigrating “Russia, Russia, Russia,” has become a presidential shorthand for efforts to investigate his and his cronies’ ties to foreign governments.
Declassified documents released by the Trump administration on Thursday contained a 2020 assessment from the National Intelligence Council, an expert group under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence created to advise policymakers on matters related to intelligence and national security. That agency found that “Russia [was] using a range of measures primarily to denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia establishment,” and that some Kremlin actors were “seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media.”
The assessment, which was partially redacted, also found that “President Putin and senior Russian officials are overseeing efforts by proxies … to spread claims about former Vice President Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 U.S. election. These claims include that when the former Vice President was in office, he engaged in criminal activity in his dealings with Ukraine and individuals tied to Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.” Essentially, the documents reaffirmed claims long held by the intelligence community — but rejected by Trump — that the Russian government had taken both public and covert steps to boost his 2020 reelection bid.
The NIC assessment also contradicted Trump’s claims about China, noting that while “China prefers that Trump be defeated,” their election influence campaign was much more limited to increased public criticism of Trump’s first administration.
None of the documents produced serve as evidence that any foreign nation actually managed to manipulate votes in the 2020 election, despite what Trump suggested in his speech. The reality was exemplified by an interview outside of the White House given by John Solomon, the former journalist turned Trump conspiracy monger who was granted access to the documents by the Trump administration and helped craft Thursday’s “revelations” by Trump. Shortly after the president’s speech, Solomon admitted to MS NOW that “the intelligence community has zero evidence that … a foreign power flipped the vote in 2020, ’22, or ’24.”
As Solomon gave the game away, a White House staffer repeatedly attempted to shut down the interview and corral him back inside.
In the end, it’s not actually about proving election interference. The president’s efforts to force the SAVE Act through Congress have stalled. He is nowhere near the 60-vote majority needed to pass it in the Senate, and some Republicans are wary of the legislation that will inevitably disenfranchise millions of GOP voters alongside the Democrats being targeted less than four months before a national election.
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