The 2020 election is scheduled to be relitigated twice this week by the people now running the government. On July 15, the president's nominee to lead the intelligence community, Jay Clayton, declined at his Senate hearing to say who won it. Asked directly by Senator Jon Ossoff - 'Who won the 2020 election?' - Clayton answered, 'I'm not going to do this with you,' allowing only that Joe Biden was 'certified' and 'had the most electoral votes,' while insisting, 'I am not an election denier' [1]. Tonight, the White House says it will go further.
In a primetime address, the administration says it will present 'declassified intelligence' that voting-machine vulnerabilities and foreign interference tainted the 2020 result, with the acting intelligence director, the CIA director, the FBI director and the homeland security secretary taking part [3]. The claims land tonight; the record they are meant to overturn is already public, and it says the opposite.
In March 2021, the National Intelligence Council found 'no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections' [3]. A joint Justice Department and Homeland Security review found no evidence that any foreign actor changed votes or compromised the count [2]. The specific voting-machine-fraud claims were tested in court and collapsed: Dominion Voting Systems won 787 million dollars from Fox News, and Smartmatic settled with Newsmax for 40 million, over exactly those falsehoods [2].
Data
| Fox News to Dominion | 787$ millions paid over 2020 voting-machine lies |
|---|---|
| Newsmax to Smartmatic | 40$ millions paid over 2020 voting-machine lies |
The result itself was not close in the way a rigged election is imagined to be. Biden won 306 electoral votes to 232 and was certified in all 50 states; the Trump campaign and its allies filed roughly 60 lawsuits challenging the outcome and lost essentially all of them, several before judges Trump had appointed [2]. Senator Mark Warner warned this week that officials might 'take a suspect or false piece of intelligence and use it as a reason to take some kind of action' [3].
What is being staged as revelation is a return to a claim that has already been investigated, litigated, and paid for - by the outlets that spread it [2]. Setting the record beside tonight's address is not a prediction of what will be said. It is a reminder of what was found: no foreign actor altered the vote, the machines were not the fraud, and the election was certified in every state [2][3].
