THE WASHINGTON POST: Donald Trump’s speech accusing China of vote tampering lacks a smoking gun

After almost six years of promises to imminently reveal smoking-gun proof of tampering with the 2020 election, President Donald Trump stopped short again on Thursday.

In a prime-time presidential address that the White House and Republican allies said would present bombshell findings from an exhaustive re-examination of law enforcement and intelligence files, Mr Trump never claimed to have any evidence of altered votes or compromised machines.

Instead he described “vulnerabilities” in election infrastructure, without alleging that the weaknesses were exploited.

“They’re vulnerable, and they’re easily compromised,” Mr Trump said of electronic voting machines.

“Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen,” he added, using softer language than his usual insistence that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.

He accused China of an “illicit” acquisition of US voter files including names, addresses, phone number and party affiliation - all of which is publicly available information.

There is no evidence or intelligence that the Chinese government hacked or compromised state voter registration systems in 2020, two former senior US officials said.

In the process, Mr Trump may have angered Chinese leaders whom he assiduously courted during a visit to Beijing in May.

Mr Trump did not mention several topics that allies had predicted he would discuss. He offered no updates on the federal investigations into 2020 voting records in Georgia and Arizona or recent FBI interviews with former election officials in Milwaukee.

He did cite a Department of Homeland Security report that claimed officials had discovered a large number of non-citizens registered to vote in California and three other states. But the administration did not release evidence to back up that assertion. Past claims of non-citizen voting have often failed to stand up to scrutiny.

Much of the speech focused on intelligence reports that Mr Trump said were withheld from him as President and from the public in 2020. He asserted the reports indicated China wanted to undermine Mr Trump’s re-election, although he did not claim that China took any steps to manipulate the election results.

Raw intelligence reports are often wrong, incomplete or contradictory, and spy agencies rely on judgments by expert analysts to vet and piece together the information to make conclusions with different levels of confidence. Officials in 2020 disagreed about whether China wanted Mr Trump to lose and about whether Beijing took any steps to undermine him - a controversy noted in a declassified 2021 report. That report described consensus on the conclusion that neither China nor any other foreign actors had tampered with any votes.

The hundreds of pages of documents released online by the White House during Mr Trump’s speech did not appear to support Mr Trump’s contention that China interfered in the 2020 election to try to defeat him or that US intelligence officials deliberately hid information about Beijing’s intentions from him.

The reports, some of which are heavily redacted, show that China acquired millions of U.S. voter records - a fact that has long been known - and made plans to influence American politics in its favour.

An undated CIA report, based on sensitive intelligence gathered from 2018 to 2020, said the Beijing government wanted Mr Trump “to lose the next election.” But it described China using political and economic influence, not election hacking.

Another CIA report, dated July 2020, said that Chinese cyber actors were targeting the campaign of Democrat Joe Biden, not Mr Trump.

US spy agencies assessed “that China does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election, although this activity could enable such operations,” the report said.

Several of the documents show spy agency officials arguing over how to portray China’s actions - a normal part of intelligence analysis.

A March 2021 report by the prestigious National Intelligence Council, made public more than five years ago, found that Beijing did not attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. One senior official dissented, saying China took “at least some steps” to undermine Mr Trump’s re-election chances.

The White House had briefed right-wing allies and media figures on Monday about the plans for Mr Trump’s speech, fuelling online hype that included speculation Mr Trump would go so far as to declare Georgia’s Democratic senators illegitimate or release new evidence of Chinese meddling.

When that did not materialise, Trump supporters emphasised allegations of intelligence cover-ups or attacked news networks for not airing the speech.

“There’s a cultural stain in the intelligence community that this data shows,” John Solomon, a pro-Trump journalist who advised the White House on releasing the documents, said on former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s online talk show after the speech.

The decision by NBC and ABC not to interrupt their prime-time programming to air the speech live clearly irked Mr Trump, who attacked them by name and called for the government to revoke their licenses. Fox News and CBS carried the speech live.

Mr Trump concluded the speech by renewing his demand for Congress to pass stricter voter ID and citizenship rules. Senate Republicans say they lack the votes.

“That election was a closed issue back in 2020,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said Wednesday. “I’m not looking back into the past. I’m looking to the future.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt rejected criticism that said the president should be focused on voters’ priorities, such as the economy. She added that advisers discussed addressing other subjects such as the Iran war and the economy.

Mr Trump spent the first six minutes of his speech arguing his administration secured the southern border, deported criminals, cut taxes and lowered prescription drug prices. He suggested the Iran war would be won “very soon” and touted cooling inflation last month, although many analysts and investors expect the collapse of the ceasefire with Iran to push prices higher again.

Mr Trump said his administration would work with state and local officials to protect voter data, patch technical vulnerabilities and remove non-citizens from voter rolls. Democratic governors responded by accusing him of trying to undermine public confidence in elections.

“Tonight, Americans heard the president once again repeat claims about our elections that have been investigated for years and repeatedly rejected,” Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Mark Warner (D-Virginia) said.

“The greatest danger to our elections right now is false narratives seized upon here at home as a pretext to convince Americans their elections cannot be trusted – or worse, to justify unprecedented federal intervention in elections that the Constitution entrusts to the states.”

Democrats also said Mr Trump’s preoccupation with his loss six years ago would cost him with voters, who increasingly disapprove of his handling of the Iran war and the economy. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said Mr Trump was making preparations to undermine or challenge the midterm election results.

“Tonight was a pathetic attempt by Trump to deny what we all know is true - he lost the 2020 election,” Mr Schumer said in a statement after the speech.

“The American people were fed up with Donald Trump then and they’re even more fed up with him now as he sends costs skyrocketing, brings chaos to their streets, and enriches his friends and family through rampant corruption.”

Mr Trump spoke in the East Room before about 55 people, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, acting attorney general Todd Blanche, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel and acting director of national intelligence Bill Pulte.

When the broadcast ended the audience broke into applause, and Trump joked with the group about election fraud, the country’s 250th anniversary and other topics for about 20 minutes.