President Trump on Thursday night delivered what he called a major speech about election security, in which he shared some information from newly declassified documents about foreign interference in the 2020 election. That’s the election Trump lost to Joe Biden, although he has never conceded to this day, spending the last several years spinning a web of numerous, often contradictory conspiracy theories.
Per The Daily Beast, the world’s experts and fact-checkers have strongly challenged various assertions in Trump’s speech.
President Trump announced that his administration is declassifying intelligence that reveals “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” including “hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.”
FACT CHECK RATING: False.
Officials have repeatedly said election… pic.twitter.com/CVmy4wFeMA
— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 17, 2026
Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer who has been anti-Trump since the president’s rise, got to the heart of the matter on CNN:
“What stood out to me is that there’s still no evidence of a result of any election being incorrect,” Ginsberg told Kaitlan Collins in his appearance. “There still was not the documents, there still was not the evidence, although we’ll see what’s produced.”
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Ginsberg added that “the administration has cut back on the cybersecurity agency, CISA, and the Department of Justice outfit that helps states so that, in fact, if there is a problem with the 2026 election, it will be in large part because the defenses that are provided by the federal government to the states to stop that activity have been drastically cut back.”
Miles Taylor, another Republican who has turned on Trump, said on X that he had personally briefed Trump on Chinese attempts to interfere in elections, in 2018:
Trump suggested the “Deep State” hid from him that China was trying to interfere in our elections…
… maybe he forgot that we personally briefed him on the threat throughout 2018.
Big mistake to make claims living humans can refute.
— Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) July 17, 2026
And as CNN’s Zachary Cohen noted, a lot of the assertions are old news at this point.
“The documents Trump is referring to right now, and CNN has reviewed all of them, largely discuss vulnerabilities that have been known for years and/or are reflected in the 2021 US intel community assessment,” Cohen said. “None of the declassified information supports the claim that any previous election results — including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost — were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would’ve changed the outcome.”
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
