President Donald Trump will address the nation on Thursday night with newly declassified intelligence at the center of remarks that are set to revisit the 2020 election and voting machine vulnerabilities. The White House says he will use the speech to discuss what it views as flaws in election systems that could permit foreign cyber intrusion.
An administration official said the address will cover national elections and the intelligence that has been declassified around 2020. That puts Trump on a national stage with a message he has pressed for years: that he lost to Joe Biden because of massive fraud, even though courts, ballot audits and his own first-term Justice Department found no evidence of fraud or vote-machine rigging.
The push matters now because the speech comes as the administration has spent more than a year seeking greater federal oversight of election administration and a redesign of how Americans vote. Democrats and some election security experts have warned that those efforts could bleed into the November midterm elections, where control of Congress is at stake.
The newly declassified material has not been publicly detailed, but the outline of the case is clear. In 2021, a U.S. intelligence assessment found no indications that a foreign actor had tried or succeeded in altering any technical aspect of the vote. The federal cybersecurity watchdog later joined other federal, state and local officials in calling the election “the most secure in American history.”
That finding sits uneasily beside the White House’s latest claims. An administration official said Trump will argue that voting machine flaws could create a path for foreign cyber intrusion, even though election officials have maintained that the machines are secure enough and that no evidence has surfaced of foreign meddling that changed results. Last year, Mojave Research said a forensic analysis of voting machines seized in Puerto Rico found flaws but no sign of hacking.
The administration has also formed a task force to investigate elements of the 2020 election, and John Solomon is working on that effort, according to one source familiar with the matter. Trump said last month that he had authorized Bill Pulte to declassify documents related to the vote, after appointing Pulte as Tulsi Gabbard's interim replacement.
What Trump says on Thursday night will matter less for what it settles than for what it sets in motion. If he names the declassified material, it could become the latest pillar of a broader campaign to recast the 2020 vote and intensify pressure on election officials heading into November.
