I helped oversee election security for Trump. He's about to swap the "Big Lie" for a Bigger Lie.
The president will reportedly begin releasing cherry-picked intelligence from 2020 to make it look like a foreign country helped Joe Biden win. The claims are categorically false.
The White House hastily manufactured a Big Lie in 2020 that the election was stolen from Trump, but in the frenzied aftermath, it couldn’t really find a culprit. So after years of searching desperately for a thief, Trump and team have decided to invent one.
Get ready for the Bigger Lie.
The president wants a spectacle on Thursday. According to reporting from MSNOW, the White House is preparing to release classified intelligence documents it claims will reveal “irregularities” in American elections, as part of a preview of the president’s address that will allege foreign actors stole the election from him in 2020. In those remarks, he may even name the culprit. I’ll get to that in a moment.
But first, I know what’s in that well of information he’s drawing from, because I helped dig it. During Donald Trump’s first term, I worked on election protection at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), helping to stand up the administration’s response to historic Russian interference in 2016. We built an entire, government-wide response system — intelligence analysts, cyber defenders, and law enforcement agents — who were full-time focused on stopping any such attack from happening again. And I can tell you now, before Trump says a single word, he’s full of shit.
Pardon my language. But I’m virtually certain that whatever he presents on Thursday, it will be twice-warmed leftovers of information, cherry-picked and recast to tell a story our intelligence agencies never told because it was never true. Indeed, the president appears poised to make it sound like a foreign adversary, specifically China, took away the White House from him by helping Joe Biden win. If the Big Lie was bad, this will be even Bigger because now he’s might name the actual boogeyman that has eluded him, over years of delusional claims about an unfair loss.
Before you get caught up in his stream of lies, here’s what actually happened in 2020 when it comes to foreign interference. Yes, America’s adversaries tried to meddle in our elections during Trump’s first term and amidst his re-election. Russia did. Iran did. China did. We knew it, we tracked it, and the U.S. government declassified much of that information years ago. But our agencies were unanimous on a crucial point: none of those bad guys changed votes. Not in 2018. Not in 2020.
Chris Krebs, my former colleague and Trump’s own cybersecurity chief, said it plainly by calling the 2020 election the “most secure in American history.” At the very least, it was the most scrutinized in American history, leaving experts able to say with high confidence that no foreign adversary affected the outcome. That angered Trump. He wanted to say someone stole victory from him. But Chris Krebs stood in the way of the Big Lie with a simple truth. And for doing so, the president fired Chris by tweet.
I’m going to make a revelation, right here, that I want you to remember on Thursday when this sideshow begins again.
Trump never wanted election security; he wanted selective election security. In 2018, ahead of the midterms, we briefed him on the full threat landscape. Multiple countries were planning to interfere. We advised the White House that we needed to expose all of those actors and threaten them with consequences. Trump seemed uninterested in calling them out, with one exception. He was keenly interested in exposing any country that wanted to interfere in ways that would be unhelpful to his party’s chances, specifically: China.
And wouldn’t you know it — that September, Trump stood before the UN General Assembly and delivered sweeping warnings about Chinese interference. Yet he said next to nothing about Russia, the country that had actually run a sophisticated operation to help him in 2016 and was gearing up to do it again. We were gobsmacked. So were Members of Congress briefed on the same intelligence.
Russia was the far more serious threat (and far more invested in meddling), yet Trump deliberately avoided criticizing Moscow in his impassioned remarks about election security. Inside the national security community, the conclusion was as obvious as it was appalling. Trump welcomed foreign interference when it helped him and opposed it when the threat actors seemed eager to hurt his chances. Here’s what I had to say about it last night on Nicolle Wallace’s show, Deadline: White House.
So when Trump resurrects those old snippets about Chinese meddling Thursday and inflates them into “proof” that 2020 was stolen from him, remember that he’s recycling intelligence he cherry-picked for political convenience eight years ago. The intelligence community already revealed that China might have had a preference for hurting Trump, but there wasn’t a shred of evidence they succeeded in shifting public opinion, let alone changing any votes. If this evidence were real, Trump himself had the power to declassify all of it before leaving office in January 2021. He didn’t… because it doesn’t say what he’ll claim it says… and the proof doesn’t exist.
Add this to the list of ways the White House is trying to undermine confidence in the midterms this year. The public is already on edge. And with loyalists now installed atop the DNI, DOJ, and FBI, this administration is mounting a whole-of-government campaign to sow doubt about the vote that it fears it will lose. So much so that they’re firing off unconstitutional executive orders to take over mail-in voting, trying to seize state voter rolls, threatening local election officials with crimes for refusing to comply, dispatching monitors to Democratic cities, dangling FEMA funds as leverage, and so much more. Now add to that list the manipulation of intelligence.
Don’t let it work. Thursday night, America won’t see any breathtaking new evidence. It will see an old man and a sore loser who still cannot accept that he lost, fair and square. And it will see a man who is willing to burn down public faith in democracy itself rather than admit it. Donald Trump is getting ready to roll out a Bigger Lie than last time. Thankfully, the truth is bigger and better, and (once again) it will defeat him.
Your friend, in defiance,
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