When President Trump attempted to contest and overturn the 2020 election results, he encountered strong resistance — not only from the courts but also from numerous officials within his own administration.
He sought to eliminate dissent upon his return to the White House, requiring prospective appointees to pass a litmus test: whether they believed the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
Now that like-minded allies occupy senior positions across the federal government, Mr. Trump has directed the full force of the administration toward his longstanding focus: undermining confidence in the security of the nation’s election infrastructure.
Agencies including the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Postal Service have moved to revive his unfounded claims about the 2020 election and to assert federal authority over state-managed elections.
His initiative received further support on Thursday from the nation’s intelligence agencies, which supplied the White House with a cache of declassified material that Mr. Trump presented as proof of a flawed election system.
“Tonight, I am announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence that reveals shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” the president declared during a prime‑time address from the East Room.
Mr. Trump said he had ordered the FBI, CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice to investigate what he called a “cover‑up” by U.S. officials regarding China’s alleged attempts to influence American elections.
In fact, the heavily redacted documents did not expose new weaknesses in the election system or evidence of foreign vote manipulation. They did reveal intense internal debate over how to characterize China’s activities, the general outlines of which have been public for years.
The president’s use of a whole‑of‑government approach to shape public perception of elections — and possibly voting eligibility — has alarmed officials and experts nationwide.
“I have never seen anything like this in my 42 years of work in law enforcement and homeland security, under both Republican and Democratic administrations,” said John Cohen, a senior intelligence and counterterrorism official.
“In the most benign sense, this leads to greater skepticism about the electoral process and its results,” he said. “The worst‑case scenario is an escalation of federal efforts to assume control over elections.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Trump declared that he wanted the federal government to “take over” and nationalize elections — a power the Constitution reserves to the states.
He has not yet pursued that extreme, but he has placed election skeptics and loyalists throughout his administration, including in agencies traditionally responsible for assisting states with election security.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is urging states to alter their election procedures or risk losing tens of millions of dollars in terrorism‑prevention funding. The Postal Service has proposed a rule permitting it to withhold mail‑ballot delivery from states that refuse to provide their voter rolls to the federal government, a measure currently blocked by a federal judge.
Mr. Trump has sought to overturn centuries of established election law via executive orders, such as one mandating proof of citizenship for voter registration and requiring all mail ballots to be returned by Election Day. Courts have largely blocked these orders, prompting him to push Congress to enact the SAVE Act, which would embed many of his executive actions into statute.
“How easy is it to do, unless you want to cheat?” Mr. Trump asked during his Thursday speech. “The only reason you wouldn’t do it is because you want to cheat, since your policies are weak and your candidates are ineffective, making it impossible to win otherwise.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly relied on the Department of Justice — now led by his former personal attorney Todd Blanche — to advance greater control over elections. Officials have considered whether they could pursue criminal charges against state or local election officials if the administration concluded they had inadequately protected their computer systems.
The Department of Justice, historically committed to nonpartisanship, has also attempted to obtain state voter files in order to compile a national voter roll.
Mr. Trump has increasingly drawn the nation’s intelligence agencies into his efforts. Earlier this year, Tulsi Gabbard, then director of national intelligence, assisted the FBI’s investigation of ballots cast in Fulton County, Georgia, in 2020 to appease the president. She was succeeded this summer by acting official Bill Pulte, who supplied the White House with some of the documents released on Thursday.
During his confirmation hearing this week, Jay Clayton, Mr. Trump’s nominee for a permanent role, avoided questions from Democrats seeking a clear statement that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had fairly won the 2020 election.
“You will be in a room with him many times, and you should feel free to disagree with him,” Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, pressed. “If you cannot disagree with him when he’s not present, can you truly do so while sitting across from him in the Oval Office or the Situation Room?”
State officials from both parties have resisted the Trump administration’s attempts to assert control over election processes. At least 30 states have refused to provide their voter data, thereby blocking Justice Department litigation.
Officials in several deeply Republican states have also balked at the demand.
“Your insinuations of criminal violations of federal election laws are not well taken,” James E.M. Craig, a lawyer in the Idaho attorney general’s office, wrote in response to the Justice Department’s letters this month. He urged the department to “stop threatening your friends in Idaho.”
Democratic election officials nationwide argue that Mr. Trump’s actions indicate an intent to interfere with the electoral process in ways that could benefit his party.
Secretaries of state, attorneys general and party officials have prepared contingency plans, including lawsuits to determine whether the administration intends to deploy armed personnel at polling places, and have drafted litigation should such plans materialize.
Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state, said his office has implemented a range of measures anticipating federal challenges. Nevada officials have launched a program that texts voters directly about the status of their mail ballots, adopted a new election system featuring a clear paper printout of each ballot, and expanded their own cybersecurity capabilities, recognizing they cannot rely on federal agencies.
Mr. Trump has dismissed employees at the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who were working to protect elections from foreign threats. He reduced the size of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, an intelligence unit that monitors election interference, and earlier this month forced out the leadership of the Election Assistance Commission, a small agency that for a decade has assisted states in reviewing and improving voting‑machine safeguards.
The weakened federal security apparatus has left states to fill the gaps. Officials previously from the CIA conducted physical security assessments of county election offices in Colorado, for example. Following the cuts, the secretary of state’s office now must carry out those site visits.
“We have to do it ourselves,” Mr. Aguilar said in an interview, adding that there could be no “dependence on the federal government.”
Former federal officials have noted the irony in Mr. Trump’s dismantling of many election‑security initiatives that were created or strengthened during his first term.
“It feels odd to defend the first Trump administration to the second,” said Geoff Hale, a former senior election‑security official at the CIA who left the agency last year.
States have markedly improved their election‑security efforts since the revelation of Russian interference a decade ago and now have stronger protocols than before Russia targeted the 2016 election. Yet the federal government has reverted to a pre‑2016 posture, Mr. Hale said, no longer regularly sharing threat intelligence with states or convening election officials to address emerging local and state issues.
Perhaps the most crucial difference is that in 2020, senior officials at the Justice Department and other agencies resisted Mr. Trump during the chaotic final weeks of his first term, pushing back against attempts to seize state voting machines or promote conspiracies that vote counts were manipulated.
“That was an important part of the election’s history and how it unfolded,” Mr. Hale, now a visiting fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said. “Without that backbone, outcomes may differ.”
