Then he said something that deserves far more attention than it received. “Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen and the trust of the American people was lost.” But the election he is talking about is 2020. Donald Trump was the President of the United States. The federal government was under his control. His attorney general, his FBI director, his intelligence agencies, and his Department of Homeland Security all served under him. If the election had truly been “rigged and stolen,” it would have happened on his watch. But it wasn’t. Dozens of courts rejected his claims. His own administration found no evidence of fraud that could have changed the outcome. The American people voted against him, and he lost. That’s the reality he is still trying to rewrite.
But this time he did not just complain to the American people. He announced a plan, and he based it all around supposed evidence. But let’s look at what he actually released tonight, because the documents do not say what he told America they say.
Trump claimed that China carried out “the largest compromise of election data in history,” acquiring 220 million voter files from 18 states. He called it “an unprecedented election security nightmare.” But voter registration data is publicly available in most states. Trump did not explain how China acquired this data “illicitly” because he could not. Nothing in the declassified documents released tonight indicates that China altered a single vote, accessed a single voting machine, or changed the outcome of any election.
And the claim that China actively worked to prevent Trump from winning is not the consensus view of the intelligence community. The 2021 intelligence assessment, produced under the leadership of John Ratcliffe himself when he served as Director of National Intelligence, concluded with “high confidence” that China did not attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. One intelligence official held a “minority view” with only “moderate confidence” that China sought to denigrate Trump. That minority view is what Trump presented to the country tonight as though it were established fact. It is not. And the same assessment’s core finding, which Ratcliffe himself did not dispute at the time, stated plainly: “We have no indication that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 election, including voter registrations, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.” That conclusion has not changed. What changed is that Donald Trump needed it to change, four months before a midterm election his party is expected to lose.
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