President Trump said on Tuesday that he would discuss election security and voting machines during an address to the country Thursday night, a potential escalation in his efforts to suggest that U.S. election results cannot be trusted.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly described U.S. voting systems as corrupt and vulnerable, despite the fact that he won two presidential elections. On Tuesday, he claimed without specifics that he would share “really, really big news.”
“Our country has to shape up,” Mr. Trump said, calling it a “big announcement.”
“It doesn’t get bigger,” he added, “because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”
The planned prime-time address, for which the White House has requested airtime from broadcast networks, is set to include other topics, Mr. Trump said, though he did not clarify the additional subjects. It is unclear if the “big news” that the president teased is related to the 2020 election, which he has claimed without evidence was conducted fraudulently.
The speech is set to take place as an administration task force has been working to declassify a large volume of sensitive government documents in order to make them public, according to people familiar with the effort, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the closely held process.
Some of the task force’s focus is on election systems, they said, in addition to the Russia investigation that shadowed Mr. Trump in his first term.
The effort to disseminate documents in search of material that could validate claims made by the president and his allies on a range of topics has been spearheaded by John Solomon, a longtime reporter whose work Mr. Trump has elevated for years, and who recently joined the White House as a special government employee. Mr. Solomon has been working to gather documents from various intelligence agencies, one of the people said.
Some of the materials being examined by the group have been provided in recent weeks by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is being led on an interim basis by Bill Pulte, a top federal housing official with no previous intelligence experience who has helped propel Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution against perceived enemies. It is not clear if any of that material is what Mr. Trump plans to highlight on Thursday.
Mr. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, had taken voting machines from Puerto Rico and brought them to her office’s headquarters to study, according to intelligence officials. Her team also reviewed years of intelligence analysis on potential election vulnerabilities. While she drafted a report on potential vulnerabilities, the document was never released amid disagreements in the administration over the findings.
Mr. Trump has indicated that he installed Mr. Pulte as the acting director with the expectation that Mr. Pulte would use his limited time in the job to promote claims about voting problems. After the president announced Mr. Pulte for the acting post, Mr. Trump praised him as smart, adding that “you may find out some things about the rigged elections.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Pulte’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
On Wednesday, the Senate will conduct a confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Mr. Trump’s nominee to serve as the director of national intelligence in a permanent capacity.
Mr. Trump has continued to focus on his loss in the 2020 election. In recent months, he has reiterated false claims that mail ballots are broadly insecure, and that voting by noncitizens is widespread.
Mr. Trump’s stepped-up efforts to raise doubts about election security come roughly four months before the midterm elections, as he has empowered his administration to use the levers of the federal government to reshape the rules and procedures around voting.
He has focused on mail voting, which was significantly expanded across the country in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic.
White House officials would not discuss plans for the speech, one of the few prime-time addresses that Mr. Trump will have delivered so far in his second term.
“As usual, anonymous sources are speculating about what President Trump will say,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement, adding: “The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in.”
Indeed, Mr. Trump is notorious for going off script during his public appearances.
