The Worst Lies from Trump’s Speech

Do you remember this? What are the odds if left in office that he will continue trying to cheat? I will tell you, 100%. Not 5, not 10, or even 50, but 100%. If you have found him guilty, and you do not remove him from office, he will continue trying to cheat in the election until he succeeds. That was, of course, Trump's first impeachment, when I made the argument, not all that surprising, that if we didn't stop Donald Trump, if we didn't remove him from office, he would try to cheat again in future elections until he succeeded. Well, he is trying to cheat once more. On Thursday night, he gave what he dubbed a major speech that was filled with more and more election lies. But before we get to that speech, let's look at some of Donald Trump's history of lying about elections. So there was Barack Obama's election in 2012, when he was running for a second term and was re-elected. Here's what Donald Trump had to say about that election. This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy. That of course was a lie. In 2016, when he won the presidential election, he still lied about it. In this case, he lied about losing the popular vote, because although he won the electoral college, he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. But he lied about that, saying that it was only because millions of undocumented people had somehow voted. But then there was the 2020 election, which brought on a cascade of Trump lies about the election that he lost. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. Lies that brought about an insurrection because he so riled up people to attack the Capitol and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. And after this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down, we're going to walk down, anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol, because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. Now there were efforts at fraud in 2020. But those efforts at fraud were directed by the president himself. Who could forget his call with the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, where he pleaded with the secretary to fine 11,780 votes that did not exist, but just one more than necessary to overtake Joe Biden in that state. I just want to fine 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state. I only need 11,000 votes, fellas, I need 11,000 votes, give me a break. There's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you've recalculated. The irony here is the people who are supposed to watch our elections and stop election interference have been fired by Donald Trump. So he got rid of the commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission. He got rid of a lot of the personnel at the Cyber Infrastructure and Security Administration. He got rid of the people who look at foreign malign influence campaigns at the FBI and within the intelligence community. He has purged the offices that try to protect our elections, even as he continues to lie about them. But here was the way they build this big speech last week that was full of more lies. Here's the White House press secretary. You should report on the president's speech and the findings that he is going to reveal in this speech with a little bit of honesty and a little bit of integrity because it does, it will shock you. Well, Thursday's speech shocked people. It was shocking because it was so devoid of new information, notwithstanding all the documents they declassified and dumped. There wasn't anything particularly new in what the president displayed except the hype and the lies that went along with it. So President Trump claimed that China had acquired hundreds of millions of voter files and voter data. Here that is. Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. Members of the deep state, very, very famous group of people, many cases in our intelligence agency work to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China's sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible. But here's the thing. Most states have public voter files. So China and every other country can get access to public voter files if they're determined to. So could you, for that matter, in 30 states. The Election Assistance Commission, the commissioners of which Trump just fired, had made it clear in an earlier report that most of those voter files are open to the public. And in terms of keeping them secret, in an intelligence community report in 2020, the intelligence community made it clear that, yes, China was interested in acquiring voter data. This is part of China's effort to try to understand American voters and American voting habits. So nothing particularly new or shocking there. I was the chair of the intelligence committee in 2020, so I remember this quite clearly. I remember the president even then hyping the China threat, even as he underplayed the threat from other countries like Russia. But here his claim that there is some sensational new information that was kept secret from the president and the country is just not true. Next, the president claimed that the election's infrastructure was vulnerable and that people had been lying to the public over and over about that. Here's the president. For many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems. Dishonest, almost all. They're vulnerable and they're easily compromised and people within our government knew that. But the one being most dishonest is Donald Trump himself, because within those very documents he released, it also says this. For any number of reasons, it would, quote, be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome. So Trump goes on to claim that this vulnerability leaves us open to foreign interference in our elections. Here he is. This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes levels never thought possible to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference. But this is, again, where Donald Trump is being disingenuous. Yes, other countries want to influence U.S. elections. Many, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and many others try to influence our elections, sometimes through op-eds, sometimes through social media bots like the Russians tried to use, and through other means of influence. But there's no evidence in the documents that Donald Trump released that they've actually tinkered with votes, that they've gone in and changed votes. And his suggestions to the contrary are just more Trumpian lies. In fact, in a National Intelligence Council assessment released in 2020 and available to the president, it says there are, quote, no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results. Now, they did indicate in that intelligence assessment that the Russians had a sophisticated influence operation that included all those bots out of St. Petersburg. This is what the report had to say on that score. We assess that Russian President Putin authorized and a range of Russian government organizations conducted influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden's candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating socio-political divisions in the U.S. Unlike in 2016, we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure. We have high confidence in our assessment. Funny that he didn't mention that in his speech on Thursday night. But what he did state was that he wanted to take these actions because he wanted to stop four nations from actually altering the result. Here's that. My administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by the People's Republic of China and many others. We will be working closely to mitigate any harm, and we're taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again. This was denounced by one of Trump's own advisers, who after the speech said this. I only know the Intelligence Committee has zero evidence that someone, that a foreign The irony of all this, of course, is most of the elections that Trump has been complaining about, he and his party have won. In fact, this is how Thomas Massie, a Republican, summed things up. But I don't think the problem is that our elections aren't secure because we control the House, we control the Senate, we control the White House, and in some degree we control the Supreme Court. So I asked my Republican colleagues, why are you complaining about election fraud? We won all the damn elections. Interesting in that Massie clip, by the way, that he acknowledges Republican control over the Supreme Court. He's not wrong about that. They have become, sadly, just another partisan institution. Trump also said on Thursday night that they had found hundreds of thousands of non-citizens registered to vote. Here he is. According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. Since Democrat states refuse to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that. Now, we have no idea where Trump got this number, but we have a scene at DHS when they have scoured voter rolls, have identified a lot of citizens as falsely being non-citizens. So this part of the speech, like every other part of the speech, is highly dubious and not to be relied upon. According to the Conservative Heritage Foundation, just under 100 non-citizens have been convicted of illegally voting or registering to vote since 1982. That's 100 people since 1982 over elections in which billions of people have voted. That gives you some sense of the scale of this problem. But let's face it, what this is really about is not election security. It's about their losing an election in the midterms, their fears that the president's backtracking from his promises, the war in Iran, the rising cost of living are going to get them creamed in the midterms. This is all about the midterms, nothing less and nothing more. Eric Schmidt said the quiet part out loud. Because we want to get this done in time for it to matter in 2026. Not surprisingly, because no presidential speech is complete without making false statements about California, the president threw some digs at the Golden State. As one example of the insanity, California's recent election for mayor of L.A. and governor was held on June 2nd, a long time ago, but it was just completed a few days ago on July 10th. Think of that. Much more than one month. It took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing. This is worse than any third world country. There's no third world country that has elections like we have. In fact, the vast majority of ballots were counted within 13 days in California. But California law gives the secretary of state 30 days to make the final certification of the result. That doesn't mean those races weren't called for 30 days. It's just Donald Trump once again misrepresenting the facts about the Golden State. The White House press secretary really put this all in context when she was asked, will the president accept the results in the midterms? Here was her answer. Will the president accept the results of November's elections? Look, Ed, you should tune into the president's speech tonight before you jump ahead to conclusions about what's actually in the speech. So that non-answer really tells it all. The president is trying to lay the foundation to dispute the election, an election he believes he will lose and lose handily. It is the same playbook we have seen before. And frankly, it would be naive to expect anything different of this most amoral of presidents. You can't. You can't trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can't. He will not change. And you know it.