Trump Still Hasn’t Found What He’s Looking For
· The Atlantic
Since President Trump returned to office a year and a half ago, he has dispatched investigators and analysts from across the U.S. intelligence community to search for evidence of foreign interference in an election that he lost but claims he won. In an address from the White House tonight, the president sought to reveal proof for his baseless assertions of a 2020 vote marred by fraud. But once again, he came up empty.
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The president spoke for nearly half an hour, tendentiously connecting reports of stolen voter records to software vulnerabilities in voting machines to fake voter-registration drives. But he never claimed that a foreign power had actually changed any votes, and all signs indicate that it didn’t happen. Earlier in the day, a White House official told us that after an exhaustive examination of “millions” of documents that had been collected, a team of investigators had found no evidence to support such claims.
Former intelligence officials expressed bewilderment at the president’s characterizations of what’s in those documents. “I have never seen raw, unverified reporting pushed out this way: harvested for the pieces that fit, fashioned into a weapon against American elections,” Julia Curlee, a former intelligence officer who was among those who provided Trump’s daily briefing in his first term, told us.
Toward the end of a speech laden with more innuendo than fact, Trump insisted, “We can never watch a stolen election again.” But he announced no steps that his administration would take to prevent further meddling, other than sharing more information with state governments, something that the United States used to do routinely before Trump gutted election-security initiatives at the start of his second term. Trump also announced no plans to try to commandeer the authority to run elections that are, under the Constitution, overseen by the states. Many of the election deniers who have fueled Trump’s false claims had hoped he would declare a national emergency to somehow seize control.
Trump made clear that he believes the U.S. voting system is insecure. The president’s core claim rests on what he says is newly revealed reporting by U.S. intelligence agencies, which have found that China has obtained more than 200 million Americans’ voter records in 18 states. Those are startling numbers. But they are hardly news.
During Trump’s first term, U.S. intelligence analysts reported that Chinese intelligence had analyzed “election voter registration data” from multiple states. Former U.S. officials told us that they were aware that China was stealing or otherwise acquiring voter-registration data, which might include a person’s name, address, and political party. Those kinds of data are often publicly available online.
China’s harvesting of voter-registration information is not news. It was spelled out in an intelligence assessment of the 2020 election and presented to Trump and his senior advisers, then declassified and released publicly after he left office.
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That assessment was unequivocal on the consequences of foreign interventions, including by Russia and Iran: “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process, including voter registration, ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
This is not to say that China’s harvesting of American voter data is benign. As U.S. officials reported in 2020, it was part of an effort by China to “predict electoral outcomes and to inform its efforts to influence US policy toward China under either election outcome.” U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts have acknowledged for years that China has pursued aggressive and wide-ranging efforts over several decades to collect personally identifying information and other data about American citizens. The goal, officials say, is to strengthen China’s geopolitical position by collecting as much data as possible that can be used for espionage purposes. Current and former officials have spoken openly about their assessments that the Chinese government has obtained data on almost every American. But that does not mean the data were used to subvert the election.
It was only after he lost that Trump appeared to have become convinced that the 2020 election was insecure. In February 2020, for instance, senior intelligence officials briefed him on efforts to protect elections from foreign interference and ensure that voting machines were trustworthy. According to a person familiar with that briefing, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a private interaction, the president was so pleased that he wanted to call a press conference and tell the American people that their elections would be secure. The event never took place. In his White House address tonight, Trump adopted a mocking tone as he parroted what officials had told him and have said publicly—that the 2020 election was well protected.
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Former officials also told us that if Trump was not told every detail about stolen voter rolls, that was because such activity was just one component of China’s broader efforts to influence politics in the United States. Trump now appears to claim that because he wasn’t informed of every piece of intelligence, biased officials were trying to hide the truth from him. But it’s routine practice to inform the president of the top-level findings of intelligence analysis and spare him many of the details.
Some of what Trump claimed was at odds with the documents that he had declassified. He said that U.S. intelligence uncovered a plot “to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela” and had conspired “to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020.” But the declassified CIA report he referenced, dated June 29, 2026, said that while Maduro’s regime did develop techniques to electronically manipulate vote totals, U.S. intelligence “did not definitively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was successfully executed in specific Venezuelan elections.”
In fact, the CIA cited a redacted source who “judged the regime did not need to resort to gross fraud to win the December 2020 National Assembly elections, given that virtually the entire opposition boycotted and the regime had already co-opted opposition party leadership.”
Trump’s history of false election-related statements prompted ABC and NBC to decide not to broadcast his speech live, despite the White House’s requests to do so. The president suggested that that editorial choice amounted to a crime by the broadcasters. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” he said. “All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting.”
In the lead-up to Trump’s remarks, his online allies had primed their audiences for seismic news, setting expectations that he would fundamentally upend the way elections are conducted. Mike Lindell, the pillow-company executive who has long espoused election falsehoods, told us this week that he expected Trump to announce evidence of foreign manipulation of election equipment used to run American elections. “The voting machine world is crumbling,” he said. “Won’t that be something? Are you going to write a big article that ‘Mike Lindell Was Right?’”
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Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence captain, wrote on social media that “all hell is going to break loose” after Trump’s remarks, which he hoped would create pressure for Congress to pass Trump’s long-touted SAVE America Act. The bill, among other things, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. Trump called on lawmakers tonight to pass it—saying, “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat”—though the prospects of success appear dim. Election experts say the bill will make it harder for people to vote and do little to curb fraudulent ballots that they say are already extremely rare.
Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, summed up his reaction to the president’s remarks in four words: “That was some bullshit.”
The reception around Trump was markedly different. After he finished his speech, those in attendance—which included senior members of his administration and the intelligence community—burst into applause.