Excerpts:

But ahead of this year’s midterms, Mr. Trump is setting the stage to undermine the confidence of the American people in our elections. He has packed his administration with election deniers and hired an acting director of national intelligence with zero national security experience and a history of abusing his position to target political opponents. The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, has made his career chasing the president’s conspiracy theories, most recently with the devotion of massive resources to a sham investigation in Georgia.

Both leaders will reportedly join Thursday night’s address. But under this administration, their agencies have gutted elements intended to identify, assess and counter foreign threats to U.S. elections, including the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Foreign Influence Task Force at the F.B.I. Last week, Mr. Trump fired the remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, which was created to help states fairly administer elections. Without these institutions, and without principled leadership to fight for the integrity of their agencies and for the truth, our intelligence community stands precariously exposed to the president’s whims.

As a result, there are a number of ways he can muddy the waters by abusing the powers of the presidency. He’s done it before.

First, he may misrepresent what classified intelligence actually says. Last year, his administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to defend deporting undocumented Venezuelan immigrants without due process. To justify the use of this centuries-old authority, the president claimed that classified intelligence showed that the Venezuelan government was directing the actions of the Tren de Aragua gang. A now declassified assessmenthas revealed that most of America’s intelligence agencies believed such classified intelligence was “not credible.”

Another tactic Mr. Trump might use would be to present a scrap of raw, unverified reporting as if it were proven truth. He or his acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, could, say, declassify an unsubstantiated report that includes an explosive allegation from a human source about rigged elections. The reality is that raw intelligence collection is full of things that aren’t true. Sources are sometimes unreliable — we learned that in spades after the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. Reliable intelligence analysis fuses hundreds of different sources of information with expertise to produce something we can validate and trust.

Finally, if Mr. Trump declassifies intelligence about the 2020 election, it is nearly certain he will be cherry-picking bits and pieces that make his falsehoods look true. The findings of the 2020 assessment by the U.S. intelligence community have been declassified, but the basis for its findings has not.

I have read the most detailed version of that assessment, and the declassified findings are fully consistent with the classified material, which was based on exceptionally sensitive, high-value, high-confidence intelligence. The government has a legal obligation to share critical information with the House intelligence committee, and in nearly six years it has provided nothing that would call these findings into question.

Mr. Trump may attempt other tricks to mislead the public about their democracy on Thursday. The American people should know that our elections are strong and secure because of the quiet and dignified work of thousands of patriotic Americans in the intelligence community, in state and local election offices and in polling places themselves. We all can be confident that they will continue to speak truth to power and perform their duties without fear or favor.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/opinion/trump-speech-election-denial-voting.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share