To the casual viewer, President Trump’s Thursday speech about election security might have seemed like yet another rehash of his obsessive conspiracy theorizing about the 2020 election. It was that, but it was also a dangerous misuse of his power to declassify the nation’s secrets. Mr. Trump weaponized America’s intelligence community — a big, expensive complex of professionals tasked with keeping Americans safe — against the country’s democratic system, endangering both.
“I served at C.I.A. for 20 years, briefed this president in his first term, and oversaw intelligence programs at the White House at the start of his second,” says a former C.I.A. analyst, Julia Curlee, who is now a fellow at the national security publication Lawfare. “I have never seen raw, unverified reporting pushed out like this — cherry-picked to arm an assault on U.S. elections and turn the most powerful intelligence apparatus on earth against the American people.”
Mr. Trump said that his goal was to rebuild trust in elections. His claims about the hundreds of pages of documents he released on Thursday — sometimes exaggerated, sometimes false — can only undermine faith in elections generally and in the upcoming midterms in particular. The president got his allies inside the government to release intelligence selectively, then mixed facts from these reports with unsupported claims. He exaggerated the significance of Chinese intelligence activity during his first term. He falsely suggested that American voting machines might have been hacked by foreign adversaries.
Election experts across the country, including state-level Republicans whom Mr. Trump has pressured to support his claims, assert that voting is secure, free and fair. Nearly every part of the country uses voting machines that produce paper records, which can be audited after the vote to ensure accuracy. For all the vulnerabilities Mr. Trump cited, the intelligence community asserts that there is no evidence that foreign governments interfere with physical voting or counting. “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” a group of top intelligence experts wrote in 2020.
But Mr. Trump doesn’t use the intelligence community for its designated purpose — to be a source of information that is contextualized and interpreted by professionals who know what raw intelligence material means. He increasingly uses it as another tool in his relentless campaign to spread misinformation.
To those who want to see the intelligence community’s work put to its best use, Mr. Trump’s misuse of its product is doubly frustrating because, in general, the nation’s leaders should be more willing to release government secrets. In the run-up to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration declassified material in an attempt to deter Vladimir Putin’s attack and to “pre-bunk” his false claim that Ukraine was plotting to attack pro-Russia civilians. Mr. Putin still invaded, but his pretext was obliterated and the global reaction was severe. This tactic worked so well that the U.S. government began using it to fight autocrats all over the globe, regularly declassifying information that undercut their lies. This had the added benefit of building confidence in America’s intelligence agencies.
But Mr. Trump has taken declassification in a different direction. Last year, his first director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, declassified in bulk the records on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. This year, the Defense Department declassified U.F.O. records. The Biden administration established processes to ensure sources and methods were protected and to protect against political misuse of intelligence; the Trump administration has not said what — if any — system it used for its bulk declassification.
Releasing old files on events that occurred over a half-century ago is one thing. The Trump administration has also increasingly used declassification and intelligence to advance a range of claims — on the purported uses of Ukrainian biolabs or the curious sickening of American diplomats known as Havana syndrome. Those releases were exploited by conspiracy theorists as well as the Russians and other U.S. adversaries, who used the material in their propaganda. One former intelligence official who worked in the first Trump White House likened it to throwing red meat to voters on the fringe of American politics.
Then came Mr. Trump’s Thursday speech.
Responsible declassification can advance transparency and build trust. The exploitation of secrets for political purposes undermines relationships with allies and partners, who remember how the administration of George W. Bush misused intelligence on “weapons of mass destruction” that proved to be nonexistent to justify the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mr. Trump’s false claim on Thursday that a deep state plot has covered up information about foreign meddling in U.S. elections will have a chilling effect on intelligence analysts who are supposed to explain responsibly to decision makers what raw snippets of intelligence could mean. “That is generational damage to the intelligence agencies that are supposed to keep us safe and give the president decision advantage in the world,” said Ms. Curlee.
The president is not exceeding his legal authority. He is nevertheless abusing his powers. “He can declassify anything he wants,” said Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer. “But what’s his motivation for doing it? Is he declassifying information for his own personal gain or ego and it’s actually harming national security?”
Mr. Trump’s Thursday intelligence gambit probably won’t shift the situation on Capitol Hill, where a bill to overhaul elections, which would tilt the midterms in Republicans’ favor, is stalled. Republicans don’t have the votes in the Senate to pass it, and they won’t do away with the filibuster to overcome the opposition.
But the president’s misuse of secrets demoralizes and discredits American intelligence, undermines allies’ faith in the United States and, perhaps most worryingly, might still find an audience at home. Some of the same Trump allies who ginned up theories about election rigging ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol are doing the same now, calling for a state of emergency, the illegal deployment of federal forces to polling stations and the unconstitutional nationalization of elections. Mr. Trump stopped short of endorsing such moves on Thursday. He didn’t in January 2021, either.
