The Trump administration's quest to prove a foreign government interfered in the 2020 election face-planted rather publicly this month. But rather than dig up more compelling evidence to prove the case, John Solomon, the conservative media figure and head of the White House task force leading these efforts, is seemingly on a mission to water down the definition of “election interference.”
On July 16, President Donald Trump delivered a much-hyped primetime speech fearmongering about election security. As Lawfare put it, the speech “was most notable for what it did not contain: evidence that any malign activity affected the result. Much of what he described was already known. None of it showed that votes were changed, fraudulent ballots were counted, or the election was stolen. None of it showed that intelligence officials had concealed such evidence.”
The U.S. intelligence community concluded in 2021 that it had “high confidence” 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,” and there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US election.” Following Trump's July 16 speech, Solomon admitted to reporters that “the intelligence community has zero evidence that … a foreign power flipped the vote in 2020, '22, or '24.”
But now, while Solomon has been attempting a media tour to stir up hype around Trump's speech, the White House on July 30 released a flimsy and unsigned fact sheet that claims China “and their proxies bought, stole, or hacked as many as 220 million Americans’ voter registration data,” and therefore the country’s efforts had passed the threshold for “election interference.”
On former Trump strategist Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, Solomon argued his reinterpretation of the intelligence community's findings is a slam dunk, telling Bannon, “What the chiefs say today is the targeting of those files constitutes an act of election interference under the definition of the intelligence community.” Solomon whined that the media have been claiming there was no election interference by China but this fact sheet proves otherwise, declaring, “Today was a pretty big bitch slap of the mainstream media.”
Solomon also relayed to Bannon that his White House task force has “a little bit more to reveal on election integrity and vulnerabilities that still need to be plugged,” adding, “I think we will have a long hot summer and maybe a long hot fall of revelations of just how bad the intelligence and FBI was during the Comey-Wray era.”
Solomon repeated the same points on Real America's Voice's morning show American Sunrise, telling the hosts “a lot of mainstream media like The New York Times and the AP tried to downplay” the claims Trump made in his speech, but he insisted that China has data “that is harmful to America's elections going forward” and “could interfere with the election.” On his own show, Just the News: No Noise, Solomon claimed, “In the future, China has the capability to do mischief in our elections like vote on your behalf.”
However, in a new report responding to the White House fact sheet, The Washington Post assessed that “the declassified documents do not contain evidence that China ever tampered with voter rolls or ballots, or had the ability to, consistent with U.S. spy agencies’ consensus that China did not try to tamper with election infrastructure in 2020.”
The article also reported that “because no official state or federal database containing nationwide registered voters exists, the document suggests the data came from a party or company, not from penetrating an official election system,” despite claims from the White House that China previously targeted “a nationwide set of 204.8 million voter records” in 2019.
