Trump says Thursday address will focus on ‘free and fair elections’

By Kevin Liptak, Sean Lyngaas, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump plans to use part of a primetime speech Thursday to discuss new findings about the security of American elections, among other topics — setting up yet another high-profile opportunity for the president to dispute the results of the 2020 election he lost.

Speaking in the Oval Office two days ahead of the planned address, Trump affirmed the speech would focus on elections and a “couple of other things.”

Officials said the speech is still being finalized, but Trump was expected to discuss several topics. He’s still deeply mired in his conflict with Iran, with nightly strikes in the country as he seeks a path to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Even as that war appears to be restarting, however, Trump framed the elections portion of his Thursday speech as the centerpiece.

“It’s really, really big news, and our country has to shape up,” he said during a meeting with Iraq’s prime minister.

“It doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” the president added. “We’ll be discussing other things too, but it’s going to be a very big announcement.”

Trump announced Thursday’s speech on social media on Monday, but did not specify a topic. He said it would begin at 9 p.m. ET. In interviews since then, he has been coy about what, specifically, he planned to discuss.

“It’s just going to be a speech, like a lot of my speeches,” he told radio host Hugh Hewitt shortly after the initial announcement.

Primetime presidential addresses are a rarity, and usually reserved for major updates intended to reach a wide audience. White House officials typically ask broadcast networks to preempt their usual programming; it wasn’t clear whether such a request had been made for Trump’s speech this week.

Election integrity has been a fixation of Trump’s for years. He has long insisted that irregularities marred the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won. And he’s repeatedly excoriated Congress for not passing his elections overhaul bill, which has stalled in the Senate, even refusing to sign a bipartisan measure to bring down the cost of housing as he pressured lawmakers to clear the elections legislation.

Both Republicans in Congress and White House staff have pushed Trump to focus more on affordability as the midterms approach but, as the upcoming speech illustrates, he’s adamant about continuing to talk about his perceived election issues.

The upcoming speech is just the latest example. Since retaking office last year, Trump has instructed his administration to use the vast resources of US spy agencies to either cast doubt on American elections or question the notion that foreign powers have meddled in them.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe last year declassified a memo that criticized spy agencies’ analytic work in concluding that Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election because it wanted Trump to win. Even so, the memo didn’t directly contradict any previous US intelligence.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s now-former director of national intelligence, was keenly focused on trying to support his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Gabbard was present in Fulton County, Georgia, in January as FBI agents executed a search warrant related to the 2020 election — an extraordinary move for a spy chief.

Gabbard’s office also obtained voting machines from Puerto Rico and probed them for vulnerabilities, but the flaws they found were, by and large, old and known to the election community.

The use of intelligence resources to support Trump’s election lies hasn’t slowed with Gabbard’s departure last month.

Bill Pulte, the housing agency executive who replaced Gabbard on an acting basis, “may find out some things about the rigged elections … I think he wants to do it very much,” Trump told reporters last month.

Trump’s pick for a permanent director of national intelligence, US attorney and ex-SEC chairman Jay Clayton, faces a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. Before the president tapped him for the job, Clayton echoed some of Trump’s election rhetoric when he commented on California’s election in June: “On the integrity side, we’re doing an absolutely terrible job, and the American people are right to question it,” Clayton told CNBC.

In his second term, Trump has also dismantled many of the government organizations set up in his first term to alert the public about foreign influence operations aimed at US elections. The Trump administration has accused those federal programs of censoring Americans and conducting domestic interference in US elections.

Trump aides have previously expressed concern that declassifying intelligence — even with the intent of inoculating the American public from foreign influence operations — could amount to meddling in US politics.

After Trump won the 2024 election, a planning document used by his transition team and reviewed by CNN said the Justice Department and the FBI should revisit how they communicate threats to the public, “e.g. in announcing indictments of foreign hackers or getting involved in threats to election security in partisan ways.”

This story has been updated with additional reporting and context.

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Alejandra Jaramillo and Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.