'Effort to cherry pick classified info': Fmr. U.S. attorney on Trump's speech

[0:00] Let's bring in a great panel to break all of this down. [0:03] MSNOW White House reporter Laura Baron-Lopez, [0:05] the Brennan Center's vice president for elections and government, Lawrence Norton, [0:09] and MSNOW legal analyst, former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuaid. [0:13] She's also the author of the new best-selling book, [0:16] The Fix, Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. [0:21] It is great to have all of you guys with me this morning [0:23] ahead of this primetime address from the president. [0:27] Laura, I want to start with you because one person close to the White House [0:29] told you that this is all about personal vindication for Trump. [0:34] What else can you tell me is going to happen in tonight's speech? [0:36] So the president is expected to once again claim that the 2020 election was stolen. [0:44] We know that that's false. [0:45] Inside of this, he is expected to release classified, [0:49] previously classified documents, intelligence that the White House, [0:54] administration officials have said, essentially alleges that there was foreign influence, [1:02] foreign actors interference in the 2020 election. [1:06] We do know that there was influence. [1:07] That's, you know, Russia, Iran, China putting out social media things to try to confuse and divert voters. [1:16] Interference is very different. [1:17] Interference has to do with actual hacking or manipulation of America's voting infrastructure. [1:24] And so these intel documents are going to heavily feature China. [1:30] And this was all looked into, as you noted, Antonia, in 2020, [1:34] going into when the president left office in 2021. [1:37] And that assessment that you highlighted was finished. [1:40] And based on intelligence that was compiled by the Trump administration, [1:44] and it was finished on January 7th, 2021, President Trump was in office at the time. [1:52] So, again, we expect that he is going to zero in on China and allege that they're, [1:57] that they talk about the ability or the intent that they had to interfere in the 2020 election. [2:04] But, again, right now, we don't expect there to be any new evidence or any new information [2:09] that we didn't have, that the intelligence community didn't have in 2020. [2:14] Lawrence, I want to get your take on something very important that Laura just spelled out there, [2:18] the difference between interference and influence. [2:23] Yeah. [2:24] I think Laura said it very well. [2:27] There's been influence in our elections for a long time. [2:30] Certainly, the intelligence community has confirmed that in all recent elections, [2:35] we've seen countries like Russia, China, Iran engage in influence operations. [2:41] This is meant to, these are disinformation operations that we are aware of on social media [2:45] that are meant to influence the American public, divide the American public. [2:49] That is very different than interference. [2:54] There's only one confirmed instance of interference, [2:57] an attempt to get into the election infrastructure successfully, and that was Russia in 2016. [3:04] And I think it's worth pointing out that not only was President Trump president [3:11] when the IC made this assessment that there was no interference in the election in 2020, [3:17] the current director of the CIA for Trump, John Ratcliffe, was the head of the DNI, [3:24] which oversaw that assessment. [3:28] So, Laura, if John Ratcliffe is now part of this task force, but he was also there, [3:35] and as DNI during the 2020 election, can he credibly claim that he's found and discovered [3:41] and read new things that he didn't have access to the first time around? [3:44] Well, we know that John Ratcliffe is a part of this process, but this process is being led. [3:49] This declassification process isn't being led by him. [3:51] It's being led by Bill Pulte, the acting DNI right now. [3:56] This person who has, I'm told, by that source close to the White House that I spoke to, [4:00] goes into the Oval Office and meets with Trump regularly and brings in diagrams and different [4:06] information and has really been the force pushing behind the declassification of all documents [4:13] that the administration has, especially on China. [4:16] Now, sources have told myself and Vaughn Hilliard that Ratcliffe doesn't necessarily want [4:21] documents, especially about China, to be released. [4:25] And part of that is he could be exposed in two ways. [4:29] One, attacks by the MAGA base because he was director of national intelligence at the time. [4:34] He had all access to all of this intel, whether it was credible or not, because, again, [4:39] raw intel is not always credible and is not always accurate. [4:43] But the second part is that there is an intelligence community that doesn't necessarily want [4:49] these documents and reports released, because it can reveal sources and methods. [4:55] It can ruin their credibility. [4:57] It could mean that China could reverse engineer and figure out how the U.S. got its information. [5:02] And it could put at risk the U.S.'s ability to gather more information on Chinese activities [5:09] leading into future elections. [5:11] Barb, you've written extensively about the ways in which these disinformation campaigns in the U.S. [5:17] have led to both the contested elections to January 6th and the violence that unfolded that day. [5:24] And I guess I want your sort of broad take on why the U.S. seems so vulnerable right now [5:30] and why the administration, despite the fact that reporters are out here debunking these things day [5:35] in and day out, they've been able to sort of do these drip, drip campaigns where they pretend [5:40] they're releasing brand new information to the public, whether it's Tulsi Gabbard or it looks like [5:45] what's going to happen tonight. And they sort of reframe it, although it is something brand new [5:50] and nefarious, even if it's fundamentally something that has been addressed before, [5:54] they're still successful in presenting it in new ways to the public and undermining people's confidence. [6:00] Yeah, one of the things I learned in my research about disinformation is that the world has become [6:05] very complicated. And so as a result, it is difficult for us to see with our own eyes [6:09] information that we require experts to process for us as proxies. And we have to decide whom to believe. [6:17] And so when people are aligned with President Trump because of other things that he shares in terms of [6:24] values, people may be inclined to believe what he says about documents. But in reality, what we are [6:30] seeing here is an effort to cherry pick classified information based on raw intelligence. What the [6:37] intelligence community does is it takes in all of this raw intelligence, some of which it deems credible, [6:42] some of which it deems not credible. And then it analyzes that information. And then it makes an [6:47] assessment about what it believes to be true. It throws out the garbage and it focuses on what it [6:53] believes to be valid and credible and corroborated. Instead, what I worry is going to happen here is [6:59] that President Trump and his team, led by Bill Pulte, who has zero intelligence experience, [7:03] is going to pick out some of these raw intelligence documents that point to election interference by [7:10] foreign adversaries and suggest that that is a credible conclusion. [7:15] Barb, when you watched Jay Clayton there in the hearing yesterday, and we played the clip moments [7:20] ago of Senator Ossoff grilling him there, you know, to watch that, at least in real time, it seemed, [7:25] frankly, to be humiliating for someone to not be able to address a very simple question about the 2020 [7:32] election. Do you think that kind of visual, those moments, do they have real impact? Or is the [7:39] American public so exhausted and overwhelmed with this narrative that has constantly been pushed [7:44] that Clayton will easily move on from a clip as embarrassing as that? Well, certainly one of the [7:52] goals of the mega movement of Donald Trump himself is to exhaust the public. In the words of Steve Bannon [7:57] throwing, you know, flooding the zone with garbage. And if there's so much out there, people tend to [8:04] tune out and say, it's just more politics as usual. But I really credit John Ossoff with his [8:09] questioning here, because too often, we see members of Congress who either lack the time or the skill [8:13] to effectively follow up on a question. And he repeated his question again and again, because he [8:18] did not get an answer. We heard Clayton say, I've given you my answer. No, your answer was to not answer [8:23] the question. And so I think it was an important service for Senator Ossoff to continue to press that [8:29] point. And I think we see how far we have come from early 2025, when at least we got nominees to [8:35] concede that Joe Biden was certified as.