Convicted felon president Donald Trump, in a rambling speech of claims, contradictions and outright lies, claimed a “Deep State Conspiracy” of foreign agents and even members of the FBI, altered votes to deny him a win over Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
The diatribe, which two networks — ABC and NBC — refused to air without fact checking, shows a president hobbled by escalating dementia and the rabid paranoia that comes with it,
David E. Sanger and Dustin Volz report in The New York Times:
For years, President Trump has offered a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories and baseless charges to support his falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and that America’s election system was hijacked by a combination of outside powers and “deep state” insiders.
But when he declassified a raft of intelligence reports, hastily drafted emails between officials at the F.B.I. and other agencies, and formal “assessments” late Thursday, he was unable to prove his case.
An examination of the more than 270 pages of evidence released by the White House supports the broad conclusions already announced in 2020 and 2021, albeit with some finer details. For example, China considered modest attempts to influence opinion in the United States, and downloaded publicly available voter rolls from several states, but never manipulated a single voting machine or ballot.
Even new assertions, such as a document from the Department of Homeland Security claiming to have found more than 250,000 noncitizens registered in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania, came devoid of supporting evidence and immediately was met with pushback from state officials.
In the end, the documentary evidence that Mr. Trump promised appeared bound to disappoint those who expected bombshell revelations, not unlike the Pentagon’s release of “never-before-seen” reports of unidentified flying objects and the last government documents about the Kennedy assassination.
Still, the trove was completely consistent with the recollections of the nation’s intelligence leadership at the time. “There were certainly nations that wanted to influence parts of the election,” said Timothy Haugh, a retired four-star general who was deeply involved in the efforts by intelligence agencies to secure elections from 2018 through 2024. (He was fired last year by Mr. Trump, for unspecified reasons, as the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.)
But, he added at the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday afternoon, just hours before the documents were released, “we had no areas that brought us to a concern of an impact” on voting results. The newly released documents affirmed that, as countless investigations, state audits and lawsuits had already firmly established.
Even Mr. Trump, in his 25-minute address to the nation, did not argue that the documents proved he won the election. The closest he came was when he said “our elections were left vulnerable, to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost,” lines that have already become a common refrain on the campaign trail and in conversations with reporters.
He did argue that those “vulnerabilities” needed to be patched, a point that election experts have made for years. But it runs contrary to his actions: Fixing the holes in the system, and testing election machines, is exactly what the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was doing, before he eviscerated it last year and referred its former director, Christopher Krebs, who had declared the 2020 election secure, to the Justice Department for investigation. No charges have been filed.
That was only the beginning of the contradictions in Mr. Trump’s effort to make his case. The reports he personally declassified — some on July 3, just before he led some of the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence — are laced with references to Russia’s efforts to influence voters, too. But Mr. Trump only mentioned Russia once during his speech, and then in passing, quoting an intelligence assessment.
His description of China’s efforts to obtain information about voters omitted the fact that most of the data was publicly available, sometimes for a fee. In short, it did not appear that the Chinese had infiltrated the voting databases the way they have hacked America’s telecom networks, its defense industrial base or its power grid.
And in giving the speech, Mr. Trump had to navigate one inconvenient element of the evidence: Many of the documents he published, especially about China, were compiled during his first term. That raised the question of why he did not act then.
His answer was that the intelligence briefers deprived him of key information.
“Everything was kept out that was of importance,” he argued, citing one email that referred to how information for the presidential daily brief was “deliberately massaged.” What he failed to mention was that at the time that memo was written, his director of national intelligence was John Ratcliffe, who served in the post from May 2020 through the end of Mr. Trump’s first term in January 2021. He is now his C.I.A. chief.
Mr. Ratcliffe was not among the cabinet members and aides who sat quietly in the East Room as Mr. Trump addressed the nation, according to a White House pool report.
On MS Now, Jen Psaki presents reactions by those involved in the election. They point out that all of what Trump is claiming is “proven to not to be true.”
In the end, Trump is lying, adding new lies on top of old ones, to try and create a conspiracy that does not exist. It is a typical stunt by a serial liar running a criminal conspiracy in the White House.
Adds Peter Baker of The New York Times:
President Trump used a lot of alarming words on Thursday night as he addressed the American people about threats to the integrity of elections in the United States: “Deep state.” “Rigged and stolen.” “Conspiring.” “Manipulation.” “Corrupt.” “Fraud.” “Cover up.”
But the bottom-line message he clearly wanted to leave with the public was this: He is not a loser, regardless of the result of the 2020 election. There were dark forces at work to thwart him. And if his party loses this fall’s midterm election, he intimated, that may not be an honest outcome either.
Mr. Trump’s prime-time speech from the East Room of the White House was an astonishing spectacle featuring a president intent on persuading the country that its elections cannot be trusted, at least not the ones where he or his allies fall short. He cited selectively declassified documents to make sensational claims about vulnerabilities of the election system, although nothing he revealed proved any outcomes were actually changed.
The exercise underscored how much Mr. Trump in his second term has come to be obsessed with relitigating the 2020 election and finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 election. In the 18 months since he returned to office, he has installed election deniers in key positions, sought to change the rules to make it harder to cast ballots, seized voting records in a bid to prove his conspiracy theories and purged officials who investigated his efforts to overturn his election defeat six years ago.
“It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in ‘Moby Dick,’” said Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “He is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. Armchair psychiatrists can say he doesn’t like losing, he can never admit he lost anything. But it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.”
On one level, according to people close to him, Mr. Trump’s fixation on rewriting the history of 2020 is about salving the wounded ego of a man who constitutionally resists ever admitting that he has lost anything. He has made it a litmus test for anyone working for him to accede to, or at least not contradict, the lie that he won back then, not Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Trump has authorized investigations to revisit his many claims that have previously been debunked, inquiries seemingly aimed not at following wherever the facts may take them but in search of facts to back up his own unsubstantiated certitudes. It is hard to imagine that he would accept any investigation concluding that he lost fair and square.
But while part of this is about looking backward, it also is about looking forward. With Mr. Trump deeply unpopular, according to polls — just 37 percent approve of his performance in the latest Washington Post-Ipsos survey — his party faces a possible drubbing in congressional races in November. So Mr. Trump seems intent on laying a predicate that, at the least, could explain away a defeat and, at most, his critics fear, potentially justify direct intervention aimed at changing the results.
“It’s the standard approach to cast doubt on the electoral rules of the game where many populist authoritarians feel threatened by unpopularity at the polls or if the results declare them the loser at the ballot,” said Pippa Norris, who has taught political science at Harvard University for three decades and was the founding director of the Election Integrity Project. “Indeed, it’s been a leitmotif which the president has used for more than a decade now.”
An unhinged series of lies from a deranged, demented president sinking in public approval and polls. He is a sick, dying narcissistic psychopath who should be removed from office immediately.
