INSTANT REACTION: Breaking down the truth about Trump's election speech

[0:00] I'm watching President Donald Trump deliver a speech to the country where you heard him portray an intelligence community that he is portraying as hiding information from him. [0:12] There is no evidence of that. [0:13] We're going to talk with somebody who is actually working in the FBI about that. [0:17] We're also going to talk to Ken Delaney about all of his reporting about the past year. [0:21] I also just want to note, because I noted this earlier, but the intelligence community under Trump during his first term put out a declassified report. [0:29] And in it, they said, we have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process. [0:36] Again, that's according to a declassified report on the 2020 election from back when John Ratcliffe was the director of national intelligence. [0:45] Trump is talking in part, and I want to turn to you here, Michael. [0:48] He's talking in large part here about raw intelligence, intelligence that can be tips, they can be just calls that come into the FBI. [0:58] A lot of those are just thrown out, have thousands of them, even on a daily basis. [1:02] Explain to people watching who just heard him kind of portray a universe where the intelligence community is hiding information from them, how this actually works, why raw intelligence wouldn't be even presented to a candidate or put out publicly. [1:16] Yeah. [1:16] So the intelligence community collects easily hundreds of thousands of data points any given day. [1:22] They collect it from human spies. [1:25] They collect it from signals intelligence. [1:27] They collect it from electronic signatures and environmental variables in any given geographic area. [1:33] And a lot of what they get turns out not to be true. [1:38] So if I call the CIA or I call the FBI with a tip, there is a record, a documentation of what I said. [1:47] But that doesn't mean it's been verified. [1:49] That doesn't mean it's been analyzed. [1:50] And most importantly, that doesn't mean that it's true. [1:53] So what we could be seeing happening here is essentially they take all the conspiracy theories that made their way to the intelligence community, were looked at, vetted, found wanting, and therefore jettisoned. [2:08] And they're declassifying those, but potentially not declassifying the information that disproves it. [2:15] And we're really at a point where, because of the nature of the individuals heading these agencies, we can't take their words at face value anymore. [2:25] And to the extent that he's alleging a deep state cover-up, it's really important to note every single thing he is describing happened during his first administration. [2:38] So if the intelligence community was against him, which I don't believe, having worked in it at the time, and if people were obfuscating what was actually going on or selectively editing the president's daily brief, those were the people he picked and put into power. [2:57] So unless he's going to start blaming his own appointees instead of the career professionals who did their job like apolitical patriots every day of their careers, there's no reason we should take anything he's saying right now seriously. [3:13] He also said something, and this struck you, I knew, Ken, when we were watching here together, about access to voter files. [3:20] Now, I worked in politics long enough to know you can buy voter files. [3:24] That's what state parties do, and it works differently in every state. [3:28] But talk to me about your reaction to that, because he made it seem, again, like it was a big conspiracy, and we're here to kind of break down all the BS around that. [3:36] One hundred percent, and that goes to what he's trying to do here. [3:39] He's creating this perception that there's this deep state conspiracy so that even if some of the things he said were true, they don't mean what he's saying they mean. [3:47] And, for example, this issue, he's told us that the Chinese have obtained 220 million U.S. voter files in 18 states, either bought, stolen, or hacked. [3:57] But, as you just said, a lot of these voter rolls are available for download. [4:02] They're not secret records. [4:03] Just because you obtain a voter record doesn't mean that you've hacked into an election system or changed the result of an election or are in a position to commit voter fraud. [4:11] What the Chinese are doing, as Michael knows but probably can't talk about, with this information, they, for years, have been gathering personal information on Americans. [4:19] Remember, they hacked into the federal personnel database years ago. [4:22] They've hacked into health insurance companies. [4:24] They're doing that. [4:25] The 2012 campaign. [4:26] 100 percent. [4:26] They're doing that not to change elections in the United States. [4:30] They're doing that to compile a database so that they can identify American intelligence officers, so that they can target business people for exploitation, so that they can do the things that their intelligence agencies want to do. [4:41] But, as you just said, the intelligence community looked very hard at this, and they saw no evidence in 2020. [4:46] And nothing Donald Trump said contradicts that, that China tried or did anything to change the result of an election in any state. [4:54] What they did was they mounted an influence operation, as did Russia, trying to get Donald Trump elected, and Iran was disfavoring Trump and favoring Biden. [5:03] China, China, this report said, was relatively neutral, may have leaned against Trump in some instances, but they've been doing that for years. [5:11] They're doing that right now. [5:11] That's not the same as changing votes or hacking into voting machines. [5:15] This is also part of—this speech is not happening in a vacuum. [5:19] I think everybody watching knows that. [5:21] It's a part of ongoing efforts here to poke questions into our voting system, to put questions into how the systems have operated in the past. [5:33] Walk through with us—I guess both of you could help us here—all of the other things that are happening. [5:37] There's the SAVE Act that he's trying to push through. [5:40] There are efforts—there's the effort to seize voting machines, as he did in Fulton County. [5:43] What else are you seeing as a former law enforcement officer here in terms of what tools he's using? [5:48] So the biggest thing that alarms me was a statement that Todd Blanche made some weeks ago in public, on the record, where he said he saw no problem with armed federal agents, in particular ICE, being at polling places. [6:02] That is against the law. [6:04] When I was carrying a badge and a gun on behalf of the United States, we were warned every two years, do not display anything, identifying yourself as a federal law enforcement agent, even when you go vote in your personal capacity. [6:21] There is such a noxious history of law enforcement being used to suppress votes during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras that eventually a statute was enacted, preventing us from being anywhere near a polling place. [6:38] The fact that Todd Blanche misstated the law to the American public in an effort to allow armed agents to be at polling places is really alarming to me, because aside from voter intimidation, I fail to see what legitimate purpose they can serve. [6:57] And of course— [6:57] Well, you can. [6:57] Well, the other major thing that's going on is this massive FBI investigation that you referenced, where they seized the ballots and 600 boxes of voting records in Fulton County. [7:06] And now, as I've reported recently, Kash Patel has ordered a surge of FBI analysts to do records checks in this case, and he set a deadline of the 17th of July. [7:17] We don't know why he set that deadline. [7:19] We don't know exactly what these people are doing. [7:21] There's been reporting that they're trying to do signature matching. [7:24] It looks like they're on the hunt for anything they can say about fraud in that election, if one or two noncitizens voted in Georgia. [7:31] But nobody thinks that there was meaningful fraud such that would change 12,000 votes, and that was the margin in that race. [7:40] And Republicans in that state investigated this many times over, and they found no evidence of that. [7:44] And yet here you have the FBI devoted to that. [7:47] And to me, that's not really about 2020. [7:49] That's not changing. [7:50] That's about sowing doubt in American elections going forward, and that's what he's doing tonight. [7:55] Certainly a big part of it. [7:56] I just want to bring Chris in, because Chris has been listening to this while we've all been talking about what we just heard. [8:01] Chris, thank you for listening to it, first of all. [8:04] What have you heard over the last, I guess, 10 minutes or so since we called out of that speech that's disturbing to you? [8:10] What stuck out to you? [8:12] Well, it got worse. [8:13] I mean, it's a little bit like trying to argue with, like, a raving, crazy person standing naked next to you on the subway claiming they're Jesus Christ, that they're not actually Jesus Christ. [8:24] Like, well, you know, Jesus Christ was born 2,000 years ago, and you're standing—like, it's so off the table of what is, you know, plausible or rational. [8:32] But one of the really insidious sections right after we got out is him basically saying—essentially, I'm paraphrasing here—that a whole bunch of foreign entities—Iran, China, I think, North Korea—have the ability, the capability of essentially a mass hack of the voter system to change overvotes. [8:50] Now, my understanding is that that's just completely not true, that there is no assessment of that. [8:56] I'm not an expert in cybersecurity. [8:59] But what's insidious about that, right, is he's creating the rationale to claim a loss is the result of some hack, right? [9:10] That's very clearly what this is about, right? [9:12] So he's trying to undermine confidence in the system. [9:15] He's trying to create some sense that there's vulnerabilities there so that in the future, a loss, he can say, was the result of this nefarious foreign actor. [9:25] And it's very clear that that's what that section of the speech is trying to do. [9:29] No question. [9:30] I mean, it is trying to lay the predicate for the future. [9:34] It is trying to rewrite the past. [9:36] They're all completely related.