Declassified documents undercut Trump’s ‘rigged’ election claim

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President Donald Trump stood in the East Room of the White House on Thursday night, his top law enforcement and intelligence leaders assembled before him, and told the country that its elections had been left open to being “rigged.” His administration released intelligence that, he suggested, would prove it.

The documents did no such thing.

The roughly 25-minute prime-time address, delivered with just under four months until the midterm elections, was less a disclosure than a reprise: nearly six years after losing to Joe Biden, and five-plus years after pressuring his own vice president to reject the result, Trump returned to conspiracy theories that his own intelligence agencies have repeatedly examined and rejected.

“Great damage has been done to our country,” Trump said. “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost.”

While simultaneously ordering the declassification of intelligence documents in parallel to his primetime address, the material newly released by the administration did not prove that Trump won the 2020 election. Instead, the president overstated the details, and made claims that did not match the actual conclusions by the intelligence community.

The material his administration released was heavily redacted, and included documents that dealt with China’s ability to influence elections and included a CIA analysis finding that Venezuela had “some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems” — though in Venezuelan elections, not ones in the U.S. Nothing in the release indicated that either country had hacked or accessed critical American voting infrastructure. Trump nevertheless claimed the material had been “buried and covered up,” though his own intelligence leaders had access to it during his first term.

The clearest rebuttal came from one of his own appointees. John Solomon — a former journalist, prominent election denier and member of Trump’s election task force — acknowledged Thursday night that no foreign actor had manipulated a single vote.

“The intelligence community has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ‘22 or ‘24” Solomon told MS NOW after attending the speech. Venezuela, he acknowledged, had not tampered with U.S. voting machines — a claim advanced for years by some of Trump’s most ardent allies in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

“The intelligence is very clear, they did it on their own machines,” Solomon said. In fact, one of the CIA reports in the document dump, assessing intelligence gathered across nearly two decades, said “neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan Government had the capability — that is, the level of control or access required — to manipulate the outcome of an election outside of Venezuela.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as director of National Intelligence in the final year of Trump’s first term, issued a carefully worded statement about the declassifications. The documents, he said, “shed further light on China’s intentions” and on Venezuela’s “capabilities.” Nowhere in his statement did he assert foreign interference in voting infrastructure changed the outcome of the 2020 election.