Advisers debate Trump’s primetime election speech amid fears of continued campaign to sow mistrust

By Kevin Liptak, Tierney Sneed, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump is expected to use his primetime address Thursday to press what he will frame as new information on foreign efforts to influence US elections – the latest in what election observers have warned is a campaign to sow mistrust and try to undercut his 2020 loss.

The substance of Trump’s speech has been closely held, and advisers have intensely debated what should be included, according to people familiar with the plans.

Alongside Trump’s speech, the White House has been weighing whether to release a cache of documents related to, among other topics, China and its role in US elections, the people said.

Some of the materials derive from intelligence gathered during Trump’s first term, which he and other officials will allege was suppressed, the people said.

Trump is also expected to discuss purported vulnerabilities in election infrastructure, including voting machines.

The president said this week that the address would include a major announcement related to election security. Trump has faced criticism for seeking to undermine faith in elections and denying results, and state elections officials told CNN they are watching closely, fearful he might use the primetime venue to do so again.

“It doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” Trump said. “We’ll be discussing other things too, but it’s going to be a very big announcement.”

A major effort has been underway inside the administration in recent weeks to locate intelligence information that could support Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud and interference. A task force, under the direction of conservative writer John Solomon, has been working to identify documents to be declassified and made public, the people familiar with the matter said.

Not all administration officials are on board with the effort, however. Some worry declassifying wide swaths of information could provide a muddled picture of American voting security and undermine confidence in elections. And others fear the information could risk jeopardizing intelligence collection methods.

China’s alleged meddling in US elections is not wholly new. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in 2024 that the US had seen evidence of Chinese attempts to “influence and arguably interfere” with the upcoming US elections, despite an earlier commitment from leader Xi Jinping not to do so.

But when it comes to the 2020 election — which Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed he won — the US intelligence community released a report assessing that the Russian government meddled with an influence campaign “denigrating” President Joe Biden and “supporting” Trump. The report said China did not interfere and “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

That assessment contradicted comments from Trump and members of his administration, including former Attorney General William Barr and former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who suggested that China was interfering in the election more aggressively than Russia or Iran.

Trump’s denial of the 2020 election results has been so vehement that those who work for him are reluctant to comment on the results.

Jay Clayton, his nominee to serve as the director of national intelligence, notably hesitated in a confirmation hearing on Wednesday to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election – a fact Trump denies.

In the final moments of the hearing, Clayton acknowledged to Vice Chair Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, that Biden had been “fairly and duly elected under our process.”

When the president delivers his remarks Thursday night, several state election officials – including from the 2020 battleground states that were the chief targets of Trump’s ire – will be attending a dinner at Mount Rushmore as part of an annual summer conference for the National Association of Secretaries of State. Some say worry that Trump might sow doubt about future elections.

Attendees of the conference shared theories of what he might allege, while game-planning how they might respond.

“We’re very nervous, because we don’t know what he’s going to say,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat who will take over as NASS’ president at the end of the week, told CNN. “I mean, we can assume that he’s gonna say certain crazy things.”

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate told CNN he hoped to tune out the speech while at the dinner, but added: “We are getting into a window where I have to caution people who want any kind of major changes in an election process, I think it causes more problems.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The-CNN-Wire
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