Donald Trump is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, reviving an ongoing and baseless conspiracy theory that the results of the election were rigged and stolen from him.
More than five years after losing in that year’s election, and after returning to the presidency a second time with his victory in 2024, the president has routinely pressed attempts to undermine the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency.
“Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Friday.
He claimed “the evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING,” despite White House officials and campaign lawyers failing to produce any within the last five years.
“A Special Prosecutor must be appointed,” Trump wrote. “This cannot be allowed to happen again in the United States of America! Let the work begin!”
The persistent lie that the election was stolen from the president fueled violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, sustained partisan investigations intended to reverse the outcomes in states Trump lost, inspired Republican-led legislation in nearly every state to change how elections are run, and formed the basis of his 2024 campaign of “retribution.”
There is no evidence of widespread or systemic voter fraud affecting the outcomes of the 2020 election.
But Trump’s post — in the middle of his administration’s tense negotiations and foreign policy decision making over whether to intervene in a war with Iran — continues efforts from within his administration to target his predecessor and revives long-standing grievances that have played a central role in his speeches and remarks for years, well into his second presidency.
Earlier this month, Trump directed his administration to investigate Biden’s actions as president, based on allegations that his aides masked his “cognitive decline.”
The president has also repeatedly asked for investigations into Biden’s use of a so-called autopen for signing pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations — a routine presidential practice that Trump and his allies allege proves he was not in control.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office this month that he had not uncovered any evidence that those documents were signed without Biden’s approval.
“But I’ve uncovered, you know, the human mind,” Trump said. “I was in a debate with the human mind, and I didn’t think he knew what the hell he was doing.”
Trump’s false and inflated claims about election results, spanning more than a decade, have also sowed doubt among his supporters to construct the lie of “stolen” and “rigged” elections, animating Republican attempts to challenge results and craft legislation to do what the president and his allies failed to do in courtrooms in 2020.
The president’s efforts to overturn his election loss are central to criminal indictments against his allies in several states.
Trump himself was criminally charged with conspiracy and obstruction as part of sweeping federal investigation that was ultimately dismissed by now-former special counsel Jack Smith before Trump returned to office.
The president also was criminally charged in Georgia, along with allies in the state and Rudy Giuliani, among others, for efforts to reverse his loss in the state.
“Trump knew that there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, that many of the specific claims that he made were untrue, and that he had lost the election,” Smith wrote his final public report.
Last year, when asked by NBC News whether he would direct the Justice Department to review his election loss, Trump said he would not be “interested.”
“Just so you know, I have the right to do that but I’m not interested in that,” he said. “I have the absolute right. I’m the chief law enforcement officer, you do know that. I’m the president. But I’m not interested in that.”
Trump has filled his filled top law enforcement roles with allies who supported legal efforts to challenge his 2020 loss, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department’s civil rights division chief Harmeet Dhillon.
Bondi has repeatedly refused to admit that Biden won the 2020 election, including in her sworn Senate testimony. FBI director Kash Patel, a prominent conspiracy theorist who pledged to “go after” those who helped “rig” Biden’s election, similarly evaded direct answers in his Senate testimony.
