After 6 years, Trump brings his election obsession to primetime at the White House
In the weeks after Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, the people Trump appointed to run the Department of Justice, cybersecurity agencies and intelligence departments all said the same thing — the election was fair, legitimate and free of major fraud or foreign interference.
In his second term, Trump, a Republican, has tried to use the levers of power to rewrite that well-settled history, something that he's expected to try again on Thursday night with an address to the nation.
He has already appointed loyalists who have echoed his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and made clear he expects everyone to follow his lead.
In an indication of how fealty to Trump’s lies has become a litmus test for his administration, many of his nominees have steadfastly refused to directly answer the question of who won in 2020, preferring to tersely note that Biden, a Democrat, became president. Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to become the next national intelligence director, was the latest to repeat that formula in his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
“He had the most electoral votes," Clayton said of Biden. “He was declared the winner.”
“And who has the most electoral votes? Is it the person who wins or the person who loses?” asked Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat.
“That’s your characterization," Clayton responded. "I’m not going to continue to do this.”
The president has embraced baroque conspiracy theories about an international cabal that penetrated U.S. voting machines that have led to libel suits against his allies when they’ve repeated the claims.
Ahead of his speech, Trump has teased “really big news” and said “it doesn't get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don't have a country.”
Election experts fear another round of falsehoods.
“There has been six-plus years of consistent findings from the intelligence community and from everyone who’s looked at it that there was no foreign interference in 2020, and our voting systems were secure and accurate,” said Victoria Bassetti of States United, a nonpartisan group supporting the state officials who run elections. “I suppose the president could come up with some new assertion or new conclusion. It would fly in the face of all the evidence.”
There’s been an enormous amount of reviews of the 2020 election. Trump and his allies lost dozens of court cases challenging the results, sometimes before judges the president appointed himself. Numerous audits, recounts and investigations, including several by Republicans, found no major problems with the vote or count.
Trump's own attorney general at the time, William Barr, said there were no signs of significant fraud, a statement that earned him Trump's ire. Trump's appointee to run the agency that watches for cyberattacks on American election infrastructure, Chris Krebs, declared that the 2020 election was secure and there were no signs of tampering — which led Trump to fire Krebs and demand an investigation of him upon returning to power in 2025.
An intelligence assessment released in the early days of the Biden administration but completed on Jan. 7, 2021, in Trump's last days in office, found no foreign tampering with vote totals or election equipment in 2020. And, last year, Trump signed a federal document as part of a regular review of possible foreign influence in elections that declared “there has been no evidence of a foreign power altering the outcome or vote tabulation in any United States election.”
Since returning to office, Trump has launched a review of the 2020 vote. Federal agents have seized voting records in Democratic-run Fulton County, Georgia, and Republican-run Maricopa County, Arizona — two major metropolitan swing state counties that figured prominently in 2020 conspiracy theories.
Trump tapped Kurt Olsen, a prominent lawyer in the world of election conspiracy theorists, to head the probe. Olsen was previously sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for false statements in a lawsuit he brought to challenge the 2022 loss of an Arizona governor's race by one of Trump's allies.
"He has committed untold taxpayer resources,” said David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Integrity & Research. “They’ve found nothing.”
A search warrant affidavit filed in the Fulton County case was full of old, debunked conspiracy theories about the vote in the county. The FBI reassigned hundreds of analysts to go through the material.
Still, election conspiracy theorists have been buzzing — as they have ever since Election Day in 2020 — that Trump is about to reveal irrefutable evidence of massive election fraud.
One version alleges that Venezuela and possibly other countries manipulated U.S. voting machines to deprive Trump of a victory. Venezuela's former president, Nicolas Maduro, is currently awaiting trial in Manhattan on federal charges of drug trafficking after the U.S. military took him from that country's capital.
Those theories have led to massive payouts in libel lawsuits brought by voting machine companies and others. Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle one lawsuit over it airing those claims and others on the air in late 2020. Conservative networks Newsmax andOne America News have also reached settlements with voting companies over airing those allegations.
A Denver jury found that Mike Lindell, a prominent election conspiracy theorist who Trump this week endorsed as a Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, defamed an employee with a voting machine company by calling him a traitor.
Becker noted there has been a clear pattern over the six years of election conspiracy theories surrounding Trump's loss. Conspiracy theorists, including Trump himself, make sweeping allegations in public, sometimes with what seems to be massive reams of documentation from elaborate election databases. But they've lost regularly in court, where the threshold is whether there's any factual basis to the claims.
He suggested that anything new from Trump on elections be subjected to that same scrutiny.
"If someone’s alleging a crime that occurred six years ago, we shouldn’t be responding to their claims,” Becker said. “We should be demanding they meet the burden of proof.”
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