Transcription
That is a part of the document that the White House released. Russian actors have circulated narratives about voter fraud, the Democratic Party was fraud resulting from Mellon balloting, and called some U.S. primary voting Democratic Party.
Where basically the intel community, and this was Donald Trump's intel community, and this was Donald Trump's intel community in 2020, the Russian government is advancing narratives with U.S. officials and other prominent persons as well online. These figures, says the documents released by Donald Trump. These figures, says the implicating Joe Biden and the election approaches to orchestrate a high-profile scandal implicating Joe the Democratic Party at the peak of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.
This document released by Donald Trump to prove that U.S. elections in the case of 2020 were rigged says their aim is to defeat former Vice-President Joe. Take a look at Joe Biden and to ensure President Trump's victory. The incompetence is staggering. It's overwhelming. He has this speech. The Republicans, for people that don't know, I know you know this, Republicans were freaking out on the Hill all day. They did not want him to give this speech because they knew we would end just this way. With Americans, he is not going to be a concerned about how much gas costs, how much their rent costs, how much their health care costs, how much their health care costs, and how much their health care costs. The war going on in Iran. He does his speech anyway, and this is what happened.
The only thing he proves is, well, let me read his words, that the the Russians' aim was to defeat Joe Biden and ensure Donald Trump's victory. That's Russia. That's that the Russians were using their time-tested theory of vote rigging in a Western democracy, which Donald Trump picked up and spouted out and accepted just hook, line, and sinker. Tell me about the speech going to rig the November election. What did he accomplish? What did he not accomplish? And was he really just trying to lay the predicate for trying to rig the November. What do you think the total number of times that Donald Trump has said that the theory that Russia. I don't think he said that's a hoax over the last 10 years. Right. Can you count that high? Can you count that high? I can't.
Now he's declassified, classified a bunch of documents that basically prove that I think that what Robert Muller said in 2016, which was there was no collusion between the two of them, but also that the Russians had intervened in the election on Donald Trump's behalf, and it just happened again. That's what the documents prove with respect to Russia. I think, Joe, you pointed out the people on the Hill did not want them to give this speech for a variety of reasons. This is the last topic that any Republican who's in a contested election in America wants to be talking about right now, election conspiracy theories, Donald Trump's monomania over something that happened now more than five years ago in 2020, as opposed to talking about the real lives of real people in 2026 and the future. So they didn't want it. They don't even want this topic on the radar, let alone to have Donald Trump doing what he did last night, which was, you know, scoring what I believe they call in the World Cup parlance an own goal on so many of these matters.
And I do think that the this that the key element of this speech, which is the assertion without evidence that a number of foreign powers, principally China, but also Venezuela and others, have the ability as if to kind of suggest it at will, they could go into American voting systems, that the electronic counting systems are easily manipulable, and that the hostile foreign powers will be able to change votes, even though there's no evidence adduced anywhere in this that they've ever done that before, but that their ability to do it is setting the table for a claim after the midterm elections. Uh, if they, they don't go the way Donald Trump wants them to, that that is precisely what has happened here. And you can imagine very easily imagined Donald Trump just saying, well, I told you China could manipulate our elections. And now on the face of it, it's obvious that they have. We must have an investigation over the course of the next two years. This is why we must federalize elections. We now have to investigate, we have to get to the bottom of this, but obviously this election was fraudulent. I just, you know, it's as clear as day. That's part of what this speech was about, was setting the table for that. Right.
So what's so interesting is something new here, and that is how the media covered this. And Willie, first of all, Fox had that disclaimer that they were reading a legal brief practically for a million different reasons. Well, for 778 million reasons. And then Fox News this morning, whatever, the comfy. They didn't mention the speech when they opened the show this morning. So that's incredible in itself. And then a lot of networks chose not to cover it. If I understand correctly, I think the media has been kicked around a bit. They did an extensive fact check on the speech, pointing out. I think the media in some ways did its job here. Yeah, I think that's right, Meeka. There is not an obligation on the part of the press that are trusted to platform just bald-face lies and amplify them to tens and millions of people in this country. NBC did not take it live. ABC did not take it live. And before Trump supporters throw their outrage, there were speeches, primetime speeches by President Biden and President Obama that the networks decided they didn't need to take live. There is a precedent for this. But there was a decision made at several networks not to show this stuff because we've heard it all before. We know it's lies.
The other approach was the one you touched on, which was CBS before and after gave long kind of takedowns of what the president said. Even I will say Fox News came out of it and Sean Hannity was hosting, he was not thrilled by the speech. I think low energy and let's move along was kind of the theme of the night. A quick wrap-up of it, not sort of fanning the flames of the claims. Let's turn the corner and get to some other stories. So, and, you know, our MSNOW and others, they dipped into it and then came out as soon as the lies started and debunked all of it. And even streaming platforms at NBC News did kind of the same. I think there was a decision made that we're not going to stand by or participate in this further campaign by the president to lead up to something else. Sam, I wanted to put them out there, which he kind of gave away at the end of the speech, which is here are all these claims that by the way are not true, but I'm going to put him out there anyway. And why am I giving this speech in prime time? Because because of what I just said. Now we must pass the Save Act. So this is pretext. This is predicate for what he wants to do. He's been stymied a bit in the Senate. They say they're not going to pass the Save Act. So he may find other ways to influence the outcome of the 2026 election on the platform, on the foundation of these lies he told last night.
Well, like the rest of you, I put on my tuxedo last night to watch a speech and left the cummerbund on this morning accidentally. This did seem. I thought the biggest part of this speech was sort of the unstated context, which we've been alluding to here. Why give the speech now? Right. I mean, this, some of the stuff, and I was sorting through the documents last night they put up has been declassified. Tulsi Gabbard and others.ks or Some of it's old and has been out there in the public already. They could have done a version of this speech at various points during the last year. So why do it? And the only sort of logical explanation is that this is pretext, as you said, that they are going to say, well, there's real vulnerabilities. We have evidence that China has access to this voting data, which, by the way, you can buy. We could see the mail-in balloting is insecure. Therefore, we need to federalize these elections. That's the real concern when he talks to people in. I think that's when the democracy protection community will happen. We're going to get into, what, a couple months away now, just months of intense litigation around what what role the federal government has in administering state-run elections, because they are state-run. And so I sorted through all of this stuff last night. I went through these documents. It is. It is woefully unsubstantiated, the claims that he made. In fact, as Joe has been talking about, a lot of the stuff that's in these documents, the primary material, just supports the opposite. It supports the idea. Take the idea that Russia was the primary actor here trying to interfere with the elections. Yet none of this matters in this post-truth world. We are in a post-truth world where Trump will use this stuff, all this evidence that doesn't support his claim to create a legal rationale or we have a rationale to ramp up the federal government's involvement in our midterms. That's the only conclusion people are drawing from us.
Yeah, and you look at the polls. Make what's so sad is that that actually almost two-thirds of Republicans have been have just marched in lockstep or in an Orwellian way to say, oh yeah, the the 2020 election was rigged because dear leader has been repeating it so much. Only 9% of Democrats, only 21% of independents believe that. But how sad that an entire party has. And this is where it leads you. It leads you down a pack of lies. Good luck with that.