When President Trump tried to undermine and overturn the election results in 2020, he ran into stiff pushback — not just in the courts, but from many officials in his own government.
He made sure there would be little room for such dissent when he returned to the White House. Those seeking to join Mr. Trump’s second administration had to pass a key litmus test: Did they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump?
With like-minded allies now positioned in key roles throughout the government, Mr. Trump has trained the full arsenal of the federal government on one of his most persistent obsessions: sowing doubt about the security of the country’s election systems.
Major agencies such as the Justice Department, the F.B.I., the Homeland Security Department and the U.S. Postal Service have taken steps to revive his false claims about the 2020 election and try to assert federal control over state-run elections.
His efforts got additional reinforcements on Thursday from the country’s intelligence agencies, which provided the White House with a trove of declassified evidence that Mr. Trump held up as evidence of a broken election system.
“Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” the president said in a prime-time speech from the East Room.
Mr. Trump also said he had directed the F.B.I., C.I.A., the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department to investigate what he claimed to be a “cover-up” by U.S. officials of the extent of China’s efforts to influence American elections.
In fact, the heavily redacted documents did not reveal new weaknesses in the country’s election systems or show that foreign governments had manipulated any votes. The materials do show vigorous debates inside the government about how to characterize and assess China’s efforts, the broad strokes of which have been public for years.
The president’s ability to bring a whole-of-government approach to shape how Americans view their elections — and potentially who gets to vote — has alarmed public officials and election experts across the country.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in the 42 years I worked in law enforcement and homeland security, for both Republican and Democratic administrations,” said John Cohen, who served as a senior intelligence and counterterrorism official.
“In the most benign sense, the outcome of this is more people doubting the process and outcome of our elections,” he said. “The worst case scenario is that we actually see an escalation of efforts for the federal government to try to take control of the election process.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Trump went so far as to say he wanted to see the federal government “take over” and nationalize elections, which under the Constitution are administered by the states.
He has yet to attempt to go that far. But Mr. Trump has installed election deniers and loyalists throughout his administration, including in agencies that have historically helped state governments shore up their elections.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is demanding that states change the way they conduct elections or risk losing tens of millions of federal terrorism-prevention funds. The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would allow the agency to refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that don’t turn over their voter rolls to the federal government, an effort that has been halted for now by a federal judge.
Mr. Trump has tried to upend centuries of settled election law through executive orders, including one that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, as well as the return of all mail ballots by Election Day. Such executive actions have been almost universally blocked by the courts. He has responded by pressuring Congress to pass the SAVE Act, legislation that would codify many of his executive actions into law.
“How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat?” Mr. Trump said during his speech Thursday. “The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly leaned on the Justice Department, which is now run by his former personal attorney Todd Blanche, as an instrument to gain greater control over elections. Department officials have explored whether they could bring criminal charges against state or local election officials if the administration determined they had not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems.
The Justice Department, which has traditionally sought to be rigorously apolitical, has also tried to get states to turn over voter files as it seeks to compile a national voter roll.
Mr. Trump has increasingly pulled the nation’s intelligence agencies into his efforts. Earlier this year, Tulsi Gabbard sought to stay in the president’s good graces as the director of national intelligence by helping oversee an F.B.I. investigation into ballots cast in Fulton County, Ga., in 2020. She was replaced this summer on an acting basis by housing official Bill Pulte, who provided the White House with some of the documents that it released on Thursday.
During his confirmation hearing this week, Jay Clayton, Mr. Trump’s nominee to take the post on a permanent basis, tried to dodge efforts by Democrats to get him to say on the record that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had fairly won the 2020 election.
“You’re going to be in a room with him many times, and at times you should have a difference of opinion,” Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, pressed him. “And if you can’t disagree with him when he’s not in the room, are you going to be able to disagree with him when you’re sitting across from him in the Oval Office or Situation Room?”
Across the country, both Republican and Democratic state officials have resisted the Trump administration’s attempts to assert control over election processes. At least 30 states have refused to hand over their voter data, so far fending off litigation from the Justice Department.
Officials in some deeply red states have balked at the demand.
“Your insinuations of criminal violations of the federal election laws are not well taken,” James E.M. Craig, a lawyer in the Idaho attorney general’s office, wrote in response to letters from the Justice Department this month. Mr. Craig told the department to “stop threatening your friends in Idaho.”
Democratic election officials across the country have said that Mr. Trump’s actions show that he intends to intrude on the electoral process in ways that could benefit his party.
Secretaries of state, attorneys general and party officials have been making contingency plans, including suing to find out if the administration has any plans for armed officials at the polls, and have drafted litigation in case that materializes.
Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state in Nevada, said his office had instituted a host of changes anticipating challenges from the federal government. Nevada officials started a program to text voters directly about the status of their mail ballots, instituted a new election system that includes an easily readable paper printout of a voter’s ballot and expanded their own cybersecurity operations, knowing that they could not rely on federal agencies.
Mr. Trump has fired employees at the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who were working to protect elections from foreign threats. He shrank an intelligence team, the Foreign Malign Influence Center, that monitors election interference. And just earlier this month, he forced out the leadership of the Election Assistance Commission, a small agency that for the past decade helped states review and improve safeguards on their voting machines.
The weakened federal security apparatus has left states plugging gaps. Officials from C.I.S.A. used to do physical security assessments of county election offices in Colorado, for example. In the wake of the cuts, the secretary of state’s office now has to make the site visits.
“We have to do it ourselves,” Mr. Aguilar said in an interview, adding that there couldn’t be any “dependence on the federal government.”
Former federal officials have noted the irony in Mr. Trump’s dismantling many election security efforts that had been either created or strengthened during his first term.
“It does feel weird to defend the first Trump administration to the second administration,” said Geoff Hale, a former top election security official at C.I.S.A. who left the agency last year.
States have improved their election security efforts considerably since revelations of Russian interference operations emerged a decade ago, and have better protocols today than before Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 election. But the federal government has returned to a pre-2016 posture, Mr. Hale said, once again not regularly sharing intelligence with states about foreign threats or convening election officials to address local and state issues as they arose.
Perhaps the most crucial difference is that in 2020, senior officials at the Justice Department and other agencies resisted Mr. Trump during the chaotic final weeks of his first term, pushing back on efforts to seize state voting machines or support conspiracies that vote counts were manipulated.
“That was an important part of the history of that election, and how it went,” Mr. Hale, now a visiting fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said. “With the absence of that backbone, things may end differently.”
