In trying to show that China worked against him in the 2020 election, Donald Trump releases documents that show his bromance with Vlad Putin remains fervent

(PBS News hour, Facebook)

We knew Donald Trump's "election integrity" speech last week was a dreadful bore. But it did provide evidence of just how underhanded and incompetent Trump can be -- as if we needed more evidence of that.

Citing the work of Mother Jones' David Corn, we showed that Trump spent much of his 25-minute oratory focusing on claims that China had meddled in the 2020 U.S. election. But documents Trump declassified and released to the public tell a much different story. They show it was Russia and president Vladimir Putin -- one of Trump's "best bros" -- who actually meddled in the race against Joe Biden and did it by falsely linking Biden to alleged corruption in Ukraine. In short, Trump stepped to the podium for a prime-time address and knowingly lied to the American people. He knew Putin had tried to help him win in 2020, much as he did in 2016, based on facts unearthed in the Mueller Report. 

The speech did have one worthwhile impact. Trump has whined for roughly six years that "Deep State" operatives worked AGAINST him in 2025, when in fact, he had Putin and Russian proxies trying to HELP him. How is this for irony of a sick variety? Trump apparently knew Putin was trying to rig the election in his favor, so it's little wonder he was beside himself upon learning the cheat job didn't work. After all, how do you lose when the world's most notorious dictator is trying to help you win? Trump must struggle to handle that, and it might explain his exhaustive, and failed, campaign to prove he was robbed -- acting under the theory that "if Putin had it rigged to help me win, and somehow I still lost, that means someone rigged it against me." Considering that Trump has an ego the size of Jupiter, that thought must be the source of much inner conflict for him. Maybe that's why he struggles to string words together into a simple sentence. Here is how David Corn sums up the key point we learned from Trump's speech:

Russia ran an extensive operation to help Trump. China did not do much, if anything. 

One of the best takes I've seen on the speech and documents released comes from Dean Blundell, who wrote at his Substack page that Trump's speech marked "the most humiliating night in America's 250-year history." I think Blundell is on target with that assessment. When have we ever seen a U.S. president (perhaps inadvertently) declassify documents that show he has been in a long and loving embrace with a murderous and untrustworthy dictator? When have we ever seen a U.S. president step to a microphone and knowingly lie about such an arrangement with a Hitleresque figure?

Blundell is a self-described "media guy, content provider, dog whisperer, Canadian raconteur, and muckraker," based in Toronto. As I wrote in a June 29 post: "I discovered Blundell's work a few months back and have become a big fan. He's insightful, timely, original, and fearless -- unafraid to throw a punch, especially in the direction of the Trump administration." His pieces usually contain a heavy dose of zingers directed at the powerful -- not a surprise for a one-time Canadian "shock jock."

Here is Blundell's take on Trump's speech, which surely put many viewers, including yours truly, into doze mode:

Last night, a sitting American president commandeered the East Room, demanded prime-time airtime like a hostage-taker demanding a helicopter, and spent 25 minutes explaining that the only elections in modern American history that were rigged are, coincidentally, the ones he lost — while the ones he won were pristine, immaculate, kissed by angels.

And before we even get to what he said, we need to talk about how he said it. Because the man delivering the most consequential presidential address of the year sounded like he’d been defrosted twenty minutes before airtime. Hoarse. Flat. Low-T, low-energy, no-pulse delivery — slurring through his own teleprompter like it was written in Aramaic, mushing words together, losing the thread mid-sentence and grabbing for it like a drunk reaching for a handrail. This wasn’t the WWE-heel Trump of the rallies. This was a diminished, wheezing man reading someone else’s conspiracy theory off a screen he could barely track, and it was genuinely uncomfortable to watch. Aaron Rupar cut together a supercut of the worst moments and it plays like a wellness check. Even Trump-friendly corners of the internet spent the night asking the same question the rest of us were: is this man okay? Because he did not look okay. He did not sound okay. I’m not his doctor — but whoever is should be paged immediately, because the guy declaring himself the last line of defence for American democracy couldn’t get through the word “vulnerabilities” without it dissolving into soup.

Then, in that voice, he told everyone to go to the White House website and download the “proof.”

They went to the White House website and downloaded the proof.

And that’s where the humiliation — the genuine, five-alarm, face-first-into-the-wedding-cake humiliation of the United States of America — really begins. 

What did folks find when they went to the White House website? They found documents that proved the president's speech was a con. The incompetence of the Trump administration has been on almost hourly display throughout his second term. But to put documents online and apparently fail to read what was in them . . . that is a screw-up for the ages. Blundell writes:

Among the documents Trump personally declassified (stamped “DECLASSIFIED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP on 3 July 2026,” in red, so nobody could pretend an intern did it) is an August 2020 National Intelligence Council assessment. This is the document Trump waved around as evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Here’s what his own document(s) actually says: 

It says Putin and senior Russian officials were personally overseeing a proxy operation to smear Joe Biden with fabricated Ukraine-Burisma corruption claims. It says those Kremlin-linked figures — Derkach, Kilimnik, the whole gang — were feeding these narratives to “US officials and other prominent persons.” It says the explicit goal of the operation was to manufacture a high-profile corruption scandal implicating Biden at the peak of the 2020 campaign, in order to defeat Biden “and ensure the President’s victory.”

Yep, "senior Russian officials" wanted Trump to occupy the White House in a pretty bad way. The question that has hung over our heads since 2016 is "why" Several key documents from the White House website can be found at Blundell's Substack page via this link. Here is an example of language that can be found in the document, apparently the work of U.S. intelligence officers who, contrary to Trump's suggestions, were fully awake and keeping a close watch on things:

We assess that Russia is using a range of measures primarily to denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia establishment. For example, it is directing or encouraging proxies to spread claims about Vice President Biden. Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump's candidacy on social media. More broadly, Moscow's efforts seek to amplify social discord in the US and undermine Washington'a global standing.

As often happens in situations where various parties are trying to deceive and misdirect, trying to summarize what we've learned is a chore. Blundell does a solid job of getting to the crux of what seems to be going on, writing:

The President in [the sentence above] is Donald Trump.

He declassified the receipts of the foreign interference operation that was run on his behalf. He tried to expose a conspiracy against himself and instead published the intelligence community’s paperwork on the conspiracy that was working for him. This is a man attempting to frame someone for his own crime using his own security-camera footage.

And it gets funnier. Another document in the dump — the one he cites as proof of Chinese interference — says the intelligence community detected Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors targeting Biden’s campaign, and then assesses, in plain English, that China did not intend to covertly interfere to sway the outcome of the election. A third assessment notes that while China rhetorically preferred Trump lose, Beijing wasn’t actually trying to affect the election — but hey, some Kremlin-linked actors were actively working to boost Trump’s candidacy online.

Nobody vetted these documents. Nobody read them. They just hit “publish” and told America the arson investigation proved the fire never happened.

In declassifying documents to show China has meddled in U.S. elections, Trump instead revealed it was Putin who tried to help him by hurting Biden in '20 election

Putin and Trump: How do their interests converge? (AP)

In a prime-time televised speech last Thursday, Donald Trump went to considerable pains to show he had declassified documents that prove China meddled in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win and keep Trump out of office. China undermined his first administration, Trump said, and "they fought like hell not to have a Donald Trump win in 2020." China even worked against the Trump administration's efforts in the 2018 midterms, Trump said, encouraging business leaders to turn against the U.S. president and paying journalists large sums of money to write negative articles about him. The speech seemed to be an effort to provide support for Trump's longstanding complaint that the 2020 election was rigged against him. 

Now four days later, it's clear Trump's declassifying effort backfired spectacularly. Not only did the documents fail to support the president's claims regarding China but, in a case of someone not paying attention to the information being released. the documents showed it was Russia, not China, that actually was meddling. In what should surprise no one who followed Robert Mueller's probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election (the one Trump  "won" over Hillary Clinton), the newly released classified docs show that Russian president Vladimir Putin again went to bat to HELP Trump in 2020. Putin and his associates did this by conducting a coordinated campaign to HURT Biden by spreading false information about his alleged ties to corruption involving Ukraine. It's all there in the documents that Trump himself declassified, with his name prominently listed in red ink.

All of this conjures up memories of steps William Barr, Trump's attorney general at the time, took to deceive the American public about actual findings in the Mueller report. Without Barr's intervention, many reasonably objective Americans likely would have understood that Putin set out to help Trump in 2016. After all, we now know that Putin tried to help Trump in 2020 -- and Trump seemingly tried to cover it up in last week's speech by claiming China sought to hurt him. That leaves us with this question: Did Putin, perhaps with assistance from Elon Musk, help Trump win in 2024? That raises these even more important questions: Has Donald Trump ever honestly and lawfully been elected president of the United States? What damage have his dubious election victories done to our country and its global alliances, because of his own lack of interest in governance and the ineptness of loyalists with whom he has surrounded himself -- plus his determination to go his own way, with little or no respect for U.S. norms or the rule of law?

We will allow those questions to percolate for now and turn our attention to David Corn, of Mother Jones, who has details about how Putin's efforts to help Trump and hurt Biden in 2020 came to light. Under the headline "Trump's election-security speech: A good night for Putin; his China deflection covers for Russia," Corn writes:

On Thursday night, after days of buildup, Donald Trump delivered a speech on election security in which he suggested US elections were threatened by China. He repeatedly pointed to China and its purported efforts to hack voter and election data and to mount influence operations to foment anti-Trump sentiment. But he provided no proof of Chinese interference with US elections or of any voter fraud. And, perhaps more significantly, he left out a big piece of the picture: Russia. As Trump assailed US elections as totally rigged and lacking credibility—again, without offering any evidence of this—he fixated on Beijing. The connection was not clear. He seemed to be saying that China has been involved in subverting US elections, including the 2020 contest that he lost and that he has falsely insisted (ad naseum) was stolen from him. He denounced the supposed Deep State for having “worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people.” In 2020, though, the major culprit in terms of election meddling was not China, but Moscow.

Who says so? Trump’s own intelligence community.

The impression Trump left with many viewers last Thursday is that U.S. elections are slipshod affairs, with hardly any effective forms of oversight. That message was clearly sent and likely received by MAGA die-hards, Now we know, thanks to documents Trump himself declassified, that isn't quite so. And we also know that Putin, who can be a persistent fellow, has never given up on the idea pf helping Trump win the presidency and making sure he keeps it. What benefit does Putin see in this for himself? Many smart people have considered that question; some, such as American journalist and writer Craig Unger, have conducted deep research and produced well-received, best-selling books. But without William Barr's intervention, we probably would have a deeper understanding of how the interests of Putin and Trump are aligned -- and that likely would explain much of the mayhem that has transpired in Trump's second term. As Trump's speech proves, that relationship is negatively impacting the United States and world stability right up to this day. David Corn writes:

In August 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a brief statement assessing foreign efforts to influence the ongoing presidential election. It noted that  intelligence agencies had concluded that China and Iran favored Trump’s defeat. But the statement provided no details on what, if anything, China and Iran were doing to thwart Trump’s re-election.

As for Russia, the statement was more direct. It said Moscow was “using a range of measures to primarily denigrate” Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presidential candidate. It noted that a “pro-­Russia” Ukrainian parliamentarian named Andriy Derkach “was spreading” false claims—alleging that Biden had engaged in corruption in Ukraine—to “undermine” his candidacy. It added, “Some Kremlin-­linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian television.”

Asked about this intelligence assessment at the time, Trump said, “I don’t care what anybody says.”

Trump apparently did care because a short time later, his administration took a peculiar action, as Corn explains:

A month later, Trump’s Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach and called him “an active Russian agent for over a decade” and accused him of running an ongoing operation—by putting out bogus information about Biden—to discredit the Democrat. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declared that “Derkach and other Russian agents” had employed “manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence” the US election.

Trump’s own administration was saying Moscow was actively interfering with the 2020 election.

Months after that contest, the US intelligence community released an assessment of “foreign threats” to the 2020 race. This is what it said about the Russian effort:

We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US. Unlike in 2016, we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure…A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration. 

The report also evaluated Beijing’s involvement in the 2020 election: “We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.” It added, “We did not identify China attempting to interfere with election infrastructure or provide funding to any candidates or parties.”

That’s a big difference. Russia ran an extensive operation to help Trump. China did not do much, if anything.

This suggests that as Trump stepped to the podium last Thursday night, he knew he was going to lie to the American people . It also makes one yearn for the "good old days" when you had some reason to trust what a president said. At this point, Trump doesn't seem interested in trying to convince anyone he is telling the truth. 

Corn takes a wide-angle view of events over the past 10 years and concludes that Trump is not serious about fighting election meddling by foreign interests. That suggests last week's prime-time speech was little more than an elaborate charade:

Trump has long denied that Putin intervened in the 2016 campaign and helped him win the White House—though various investigations, including a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee inquiry and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation concluded the Kremlin covertly aided Trump. In this speech, Trump made China the bad guy, ignoring Russia’s interventions in US elections.

If Trump were serious about combating foreign attempts to mess in US campaigns, he’d address Putin’s meddling. Yet that would never happen. This speech was meant to back up his unfounded and hysterical claim that US elections have been wracked with rampant fraud—which is why, in his deluded telling, he lost in 2020—and he sought to blame China for that. The real culprit, Russia, was MIA in the Trump narrative. 

TV networks shun Trump's elections speech, a wise move as prez focused on empty claims about China and sketchy tales of voter rolls packed with non-citizens

Members of Donald Trump's cabinet and staff listen to his speech on elections. (Getty)

 

Major U.S. television networks largely ignored or downplayed Donald Trump's speech last night about "fair and honest elections," and it proved to be a wise decision as the speech focused on allegations that China has meddled in U.S. elections, dubious claims that voter rolls are stuffed with non-citizens, and otherwise consisted mostly of Trump rehashing old, debunked grievances from 2020. In a report at Forbes, Sara Dorn writes:  

President Donald Trump said he is releasing classified material he claims shows China stole voter files starting in the 2020 election—making the allegations in a highly anticipated prime-time address as he has continued disparaging the U.S. elections system despite no evidence of widespread fraud.

Trump said the intelligence, gathered by a White House task force and the president's intelligence advisory board, shows China "carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history" by allegedly accessing 220 million U.S. voter files.

He alleged the so-called "deep state," a term widely used by MAGA Republicans to describe a purported secretive group of Democrats and high powered individuals, covered up China's involvement.

Was Trump dealing in new material? Not exactly, Dorn writes:

CNN reported the documents Trump referred to were reviewed and the allegations they contain have been known for years. . . . 

Trump made sweeping allegations discrediting the integrity of the U.S. elections systems, but stopped short of claiming the alleged Chinese meddling altered the results of the 2020 election. In fact, as we reported yesterday at Legal Schnauzer, Trump has admitted numerous times that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 -- and those on the inside of the Trump organization told him the election was conducted in a "fair and square" manner.

Perhaps the speech's best quality was that it was short, 25 minutes. On the downside, it was heavy on allegations that reporters called "wild" or "unhinged" while being light on facts to back them up. In fact, Trump's content tended to produce eye rolls among watchers who actually know a thing or two about elections. From the Forbes report:

"It's the rantings of a pathetic, unserious person. . . the president knows virtually nothing about the American elections system," Rep. Joseph Morelle, D-N.Y. told C-SPAN. "He has no idea what he's talking about . . . there is no basis in fact to almost anything he said."

In other words, it was mostly "sound and fury, signifying nothing" -- typical Trump, although it was unusual in its brevity. Speaking of fury, Trump did not take kindly to being treated like an afterthought by major networks. According to a report at Associated Press, ABC, NBC, and CNN did not televise the speech live, and all generally relegated it to streaming platforms that typically draw a fraction of the audience that is drawn on the primary broadcast channels. CBS joined the speech late and cut out early. Ouch!

In the end, the content of Trump's speech might charitably be labeled a "nothing burger" while the networks claimed center ring by collectively flashing Trump -- long their nemesis -- an extended middle finger. A report at The Daily Beast focused heavily on the broadcast angle. David Gardner writes:

Donald Trump launched a blistering attack on America’s TV networks after they refused to screen his prime-time address detailing his crackpot claims of election rigging on Thursday night.

Furious at the snub, the president claimed that ABC and NBC should lose their broadcast licenses.

Even the networks that covered the speech live questioned the authenticity of Trump’s claims that America’s democracy-defining voting system was corrupted.

MAGA-coded CBS noted much of what the president said about election rigging was “false” before broadcasting most of the address from the White House East Room.

And Fox News admitted after the speech that it had been unable to confirm some of the claims Trump made about election abuse in the United States.

Speaking in a hoarse voice and reading from a teleprompter, Trump said: “In a rare move, NBC and ABC Fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about, but because of the fact that they don’t like the topic -- and they know how corrupt our system is, and they don’t want to reveal it.”

He angrily claimed that the networks and other media outlets were “part of a plot.”

Trump didn't fare any better on CNN, a network that often has been the target of his wrath and cutting remarks -- especially directed toward star reporter Kaitlan Collins. Gardner writes:

CNN, a favorite Trump target, blew off Trump’s grandstand speech as old news. The president insisted that declassified intelligence documents proved a pattern of fraudulent voting in elections.

But CNN’s Senior National Security reporter Zachary Cohen insisted: “None of the declassified information supports the claim that any previous election results—including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost—were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would’ve changed the outcome." 

What about Trump's two primary claims (1) China has made a habit of meddling in U.S. elections; and (2) Large numbers of non-citizens have been found on voter rolls? An analysis from AFP and Yahoo! concludes that both claims are overblown:

Trump accused China of "the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files."

He later claimed China attempted "to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden."

In the United States, however, voter files are largely matters of public record that states are required to maintain and which are regularly sold.

Trump long has made a habit of discounting conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies. He appears to be doing that again with the China claims. Here are POLITICO's conclusions regarding claims of hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on U.S. voter rolls":

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says his agency found thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls in California and three other states as President Donald Trump prepared to renew his focus on election security with a speech to the nation.

DHS said a preliminary review uncovered tens of thousands of non-citizens on the voter rolls in New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania, and nearly two hundred thousand in California, according to a draft press release viewed Thursday by POLITICO.

The press release, which did not say whether there was any evidence of actual voting by non-citizens or explain how DHS reached its finding, was circulated inside the agency ahead of Trump's planned prime time speech in which he had promised to reveal "really big news" on election security.

It is also not clear how DHS obtained the data. While some voter registration records are publicly available, the Trump Justice Department has sued more than two dozen states across the U.S. for this type of data. All 15 judges who have ruled on those cases so far have rejected the requests as overly broad and without a clear purpose.

Asked for comment on the DHS press release, California Gov. Gavin Newsom's office referred to a statement on social media in which he noted that Trump has repeatedly made false claims about elections.

"California law is clear: You MUST be a U.S. citizen to vote state and federal elections," Newsom said on X. "Voter fraud is EXTREMELY RARE — and almost always committed by U.S. citizens."

The draft press release states that "reviews of the four states' records" found 190,832 non-citizens registered in California; 35,152 in New Jersey; 15,903 in Nevada; and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. It does not indicate that DHS found evidence that non-citizens cast ballots or explain how it reached a number that appears to be higher than previous reviews have found.

A federal judge recently found that the citizenship database created by DHS erroneously classified U.S. citizens in a large number of cases as ineligible voters.

One California political figure picked up on Republican hypocrisy and fired a zinger in Trump's direction:

California Democratic Assembly member Marc Berman, the author of several state election laws, said in a statement that DHS should focus on Trump's baseless conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss.

"If Secretary Mullin wants to investigate voter fraud in America, I suggest he start with his boss," Berman said. "The only person who has been caught demanding that election officials make up thousands of votes is President Donald J. Trump, who begged the Georgia Secretary of State to 'find 11,780 votes' to steal the 2020 presidential election."