Nearly six years after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, President Donald Trump is signaling his intent to revive the brazen lies that led to a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol — this time with help from his loyalist intelligence officials.
Trump told reporters on Tuesday that the primetime speech he will deliver Thursday night “will concern” his longstanding unsupported grievances around the 2020 election, along with “a couple other things.”
“It’s really, really big news, and our country has to shape up. But that’s what we’re going to be talking about Thursday. It doesn’t get bigger because without free and fair elections you don’t have a country,” he said.
The Independent understands that Trump will be joined on Thursday by top U.S. intelligence officials, including CIA director John Ratcliffe and Bill Pulte, the housing official who has been temporarily elevated to head the Office of Director of National Intelligence despite having absolutely no experience relevant to the position apart from his loyalty to the president.
Pulte, 38, has been running ODNI as Acting DNI since the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard last month. During that time, he has presided over a downsizing of the agency and has been understood to be conducting a review of documents to be declassified en masse with the aim of giving Trump ammunition with which to support his long-debunked claim to have won the 2020 election.
According to MS NOW, Trump intends to hang his false claims on the newly-declassified information.
A report issued by ODNI in March 2021 stated that no foreign adversary attempted to alter or hack into any “technical aspect” of the 2020 voting and reporting process.
“Unlike in 2016, we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure,” the report stated.
Russia did, however, spread misinformation aimed at “denigrating President [Joe] Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party,” while Iran “carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign” intended to undermine Trump’s re-election prospects.
China, meanwhile, concluded that neither candidate was “advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools — primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying — would be sufficient,” the ODNI report concluded.
But since he returned to the White House in January of last year, Trump’s hand-picked officials have poured federal resources into re-investigating the 2020 election in hopes of proving his claims, including by raiding an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia and seizing ballots in a highly controversial operation.
He has also issued numerous executive orders aimed at making it more difficult for Americans to vote and has spent months pushing partisan voter restriction legislation in hopes of aiding his party, which is widely expected to lose one or both chambers of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.
