President Trump’s primetime speech Thursday is expected to include newly declassified intelligence revealing foreign entities tampered with the 2020 presidential election.
He will detail a foreign nation’s plans to interfere in the 2020 presidential election due to what the White House says are voting machine vulnerabilities, according to multiple reports.
In the 9 p.m. speech Thursday, Mr. Trump is expected to discuss voting machine flaws that could permit foreign cyber intrusion.
Election officials, alongside major cybersecurity agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, have consistently said that there was no evidence that any voting system deleted, lost or changed votes in past elections.
The president will be joined by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, FBI Director Kash Patel and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, among others.
He appointed Mr. Pulte, the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and authorized him to declassify documents related to the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump has long said the 2020 election was rigged when he lost to Democrat Joseph R. Biden. No investigations, including by his Justice Department, found widespread election fraud.
Mr. Trump and his allies filed over 60 lawsuits challenging the 2020 presidential election results in key battleground states. But those legal challenges were overwhelmingly rejected by state and federal courts that consistently dismissed the cases because they lacked standing or failed to provide credible, specific evidence of fraud or irregularities that could alter the election outcome.
Tulsi Gabbard, when she was Director of National Intelligence, seized Puerto Rico voting machines for forensic checks, flagged cybersecurity gaps and found no clear evidence of Venezuelan hacking, despite an FBI team investigating the theory that Venezuela’s government had hacked U.S. voting.
Her office said the review found “extremely concerning cybersecurity and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to US elections,” but did not provide detailed evidence to back that characterization.
Outside experts have pushed back, as U.S. officials did not find evidence of foreign actors successfully hacking election infrastructure in the 2024 election.
However, foreign adversaries did carry out information-warfare efforts to influence the outcome. In 2016, Russian operatives probed voter registration systems and penetrated at least one, but the hacking did not alter any votes cast.
MS Now first reported the subject of Mr. Trump’s speech.
In his second term in office, Mr. Trump has sought to increase federal oversight of elections.
Mr. Trump’s March 2025 executive order sought to require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration and to bar counting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day even if postmarked on time. Federal courts have repeatedly ruled that the president lacks authority to rewrite election law and have blocked the order’s major provisions.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to cast a ballot in federal elections, was passed by the House in February 2026 but has stalled in the Senate. Mr. Trump has ramped up his calls on Congress to pass the bill and send it to the Oval Office for his signature.
A March executive order from this year directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age U.S. citizens in every state using federal data and threatens criminal penalties for election officials and mail carriers who send ballots to people the administration deems ineligible. It also directs USPS to issue regulations on ballot envelope design.
A federal judge blocked key pillars of the order in June, ruling the government cannot use USPS to control who receives a mail ballot or use the Justice Department to pressure election officials into compliance, though the injunction applies only to the 24 jurisdictions that sued and only to this year’s elections.
Mr. Trump, who said he regrets not using the National Guard to seize voting machines after 2020, has repeatedly raised the idea of ordered troops to polling places. He previously told reporters that he would “do anything necessary” for “honest elections” when asked directly about sending the Guard or ICE to polling locations.
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