The Predicate
Steve Bannon already said what Thursday’s speech is for. The only question left is whether ABC, CBS, and NBC hand over the airwaves to deliver it.
On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he’ll deliver a speech to the nation Thursday night at 9 p.m. Eastern. He wrote the post in the third person, gave no hint about the topic, and signed off with his usual “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
The topic leaked out within hours anyway. Two White House officials told MS NOW (the channel you knew as MSNBC) that Trump plans to use the address to claim that newly declassified intelligence reports show a foreign government plotted to interfere in the 2020 election.
As I write this, none of the broadcast networks has said whether it’ll carry the speech live. But they shouldn’t.
Trump’s track record alone should be enough to justify that call, because every live primetime address this man has given has come with documented falsehoods attached, and I’ll walk you through the list below. But this speech is worse than the usual primetime lying because this one serves a specific purpose. The people behind it have spent the past month describing that purpose out loud, on podcasts and in news reports: wave declassified documents around as proof that 2020 was stolen from him, declare a national emergency over it, and use that emergency to grab control over this fall’s midterms that Congress and the courts keep refusing to hand him.
So here’s the plan
Media Matters’ John Knefel has a great piece detailing some of the public facing groundwork being laid to support Trump’s midterm takeover. The full version names a preferred villain (China, in most tellings) and an endgame: with supposed proof in hand and an emergency declared, Trump could impose the SAVE America Act’s proof-of-citizenship voting rules by executive order, skipping the Congress that keeps declining to pass the actual bill. Knefel hedged, appropriately, that the details are fuzzy and the whole thing could still collapse. But now that he’s planning a primetime address, this reporting becomes a whole lot more interesting.
On June 20, Steve Bannon told his War Room audience that Bill Pulte’s job at ODNI is “to get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Pulte has no intelligence background at all and still runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency while nominally overseeing all 18 spy agencies (a part-time gig, apparently). On June 29, Bannon said the White House’s document effort and Pulte would together supply the predicate, his word, for an emergency declaration. The next day, his Real America’s Voice colleague Wayne Allyn Root argued on air that an emergency order should simply contain everything in the SAVE Act, plus whatever else they can cram in.
NBC News reported on June 30 that a White House task force is pulling thousands of pages from the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Justice Department, and Pulte’s ODNI, with plans to declassify a chunk of it. Running it is John Solomon, the Just the News founder whose Biden-Ukraine misinformation earned him 2019 Misinformer of the Year from my old colleagues at Media Matters, alongside Derek Harvey, a first-term Trump national security aide. And per NBC’s sources, members have been urged to keep redactions light, even where that means leaving in the names of officials and private citizens. The only reasons to publish private citizens’ names in declassified intelligence files are political ones.
And Trump keeps leaving fingerprints. On July 1, he told reporters that Pulte has free rein to declassify whatever he wants, 2020 records included, while noting Pulte would only be around another month or two. That same week he posted about meeting Tina Peters, the former Colorado clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines in service of his stolen-election claims, and in late June he torched a bipartisan housing bill’s signing ceremony to squeeze Congress on the SAVE America Act, which he’s taken to calling a national emergency in itself.
The one thing this plan still needs, besides a president willing to deliver it on camera, is an audience that hasn’t seen the actual record.
We already know what happened in 2020
Here’s what Thursday’s staging is built to make you forget: the question of foreign involvement in the 2020 election was investigated to death, in real time, by Donald Trump’s own government, under rules Donald Trump signed. His September 2018 executive order requires the intelligence community to formally assess foreign interference after every federal election. The assessment for 2020, declassified in March 2021, found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect” of the voting process. Registration, ballot casting, tabulation, reporting: all clean. A companion review by the Justice Department and DHS, with the FBI and CISA doing the digging, hit the same dead end: no evidence any foreign government-linked actor blocked anyone from voting, changed a vote, disrupted a count, or compromised registration data or ballots.
Foreign governments did run operations around that election. They aimed at voters’ heads, which is a different thing from touching the vote, and that difference is important. Russia pushed narratives trashing Biden through cutouts the Treasury Department later sanctioned by name. Iran probed state voter websites, scraped data on more than 100,000 Alaska voters through a badly configured registration site (they saw data; they changed none), and sent threatening emails to Democratic voters while posing as the Proud Boys, which got two Iranians indicted. All of it was aimed at perception and trust. The Thursday production depends on you hearing “foreign activity” and filling in “changed votes” yourself.
And the specific fantasy Trump has spent five years selling, the one where Venezuela or Cuba or China rigs the voting machines? DOJ and DHS, with the FBI and CISA, took it on directly:
“The Departments investigated multiple public claims that one or more foreign governments owned, directed, or controlled election infrastructure used in the 2020 federal elections; implemented a scheme to manipulate election infrastructure; or tallied, changed, or otherwise manipulated vote counts. The Departments found that those claims were not credible.”
That’s the federal government’s verdict on the exact genre of claim Thursday’s speech is reportedly built around.
Bill Barr, then Trump’s own attorney general, said in December 2020 that the department found no outcome-flipping fraud. Courts tossed the lawsuits by the dozen. Georgia counted its ballots three times, once by hand; Biden won every count. On China, where this push keeps pointing: the intelligence community assessed with high confidence that Beijing considered getting involved and decided it wasn’t worth it.
As for Thursday’s declassified props, the likely seed material is already public, and it’s embarrassing. In June 2025, Kash Patel declassified an anonymous tip from August 2020 claiming China had manufactured fake driver’s licenses, built on TikTok data, to flood the mail with fraudulent Biden ballots. The FBI’s own files describe the tip as recalled and never fully pursued, and it falls apart on contact: TikTok accounts had no address field, so the scheme’s fake voters have no addresses; registration checks and ballot signature matching would catch it at any scale; it would require armies of noncitizens to commit a deportable felony officials and courts keep finding vanishingly rare; and when Customs did seize counterfeit licenses at O’Hare in 2020, the government found no link to voting.
The Center for Democracy and Technology, anticipating this exact moment back in March, laid out the bar for any new 2020 claim: genuinely new intelligence, an accounting of how it differs from what the spy agencies, DOJ, and DHS already reviewed, and a reason the original conclusions were wrong. Watch Thursday with that checklist in hand.
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