The White House hosted about two dozen Trump-aligned activists this week ahead of President Donald Trump’s primetime address on the 2020 election. The session was convened by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell and attended by figures who have spent years promoting the conspiracy theories Trump has invoked in falsely claiming the race was “stolen” from him.

At least some of the activists engaged in conversations around Thursday’s planned announcement were told to sign nondisclosure agreements, according to a person familiar with the White House’s arrangements and granted anonymity to speak candidly, and attendees of the Monday meeting were told the proceedings were confidential. 

“I’m allowed to say that I was at a briefing,” Charles Faltenovich, the director of PA Fair Elections, later told members of his own group in a recording obtained by MS NOW. “It’s basically sworn to secrecy what was said.”

He then described it. Faltenovich said the information provided “was basically all the media reporting that John Solomon and others have done already.” Solomon, a conservative media figure who joined the White House in June as a special government employee, is driving the declassification push alongside Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, MS NOW has reported.

Faltenovich suggested to his group, however, that “apparently” there is “a whole tranche of stuff, like tens of thousands of pages, maybe hundreds of thousands, that have been declassified, but have not been published.” The briefing did not provide insight into any new information that could be inside that raw material.

A source familiar with the meeting and its attendees said Catherine Engelbrecht, the co-founder of True the Vote, joined the same briefing. In a recording of a live podcast with supporters of her own organization, Engelbrecht then said the president’s speech and document release would support their claims about the 2020 election.

“You’ve no doubt read [that] the president is going [to] make remarks to America about what his administration [inaudible] regarding the 2020 election. There are lots and lots and lots of people, lots of agencies, lots of interaction on this front,” Engelbrecht said. “I can only tell you what we have known to be true, and I’ll start by saying this: The 2020 election was stolen.”

Engelbrecht’s group was behind one of the most durable falsehoods to emerge from that election: that paid operatives stuffed drop boxes with fraudulent ballots. Subpoenaed by Georgia’s State Election Board for records substantiating the alleged ballot-gathering scheme, True the Vote’s attorneys, at the time, responded that it had “no such documents in its possession, custody, or control.”

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Vaughn Hillyard

Vaughn Hillyard is a senior White House reporter for MS NOW.