Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

I want to start by giving you a sense of what it's like to live in the Washington reality distortion field these days.

Among the issues facing Americans and their leaders this summer are matters of enormous domestic and international importance, including the Iran war, the Russian war against Ukraine, the future of NATO, energy prices, massive wildfires, the coming AI jobs crisis, and really, really malignant lettuce.

But what are we talking about in Washington?

And what are we going to talk about tonight?

Our president's obsession with alleged election corruption.

On Thursday, he spoke to the nation and claimed without providing evidence that our election system is in terrible danger.

He has brought the country's intelligence agencies into this campaign and released declassified documents that he says proves his point, but don't prove it at all.

Why is he doing this and why now?

For answers, I'll ask our panel tonight.

and Applebomb is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Laura Baron Lopez is a White House reporter for MS Now.

Steven Hayes is the editor and CEO of The Dispatch.

And Carl Hulse is the chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times.

Okay, no lettuce jokes.

That was my one lettuce joke for the night.

I'm sorry.

And I know it's a very serious issue, so I won't talk about it anymore.

Laura, you get to start.

We're going to get to motive in a minute, but explain the message that President Trump was trying to transmit to the country last night.

Well, one, President Trump for him, this was about personal vindication.

This was about him trying to again just convince the public that his lie about the 2020 election being stolen is true.

That was him.

He He is fixated on 2020. sources close to the White House have told me it's what keeps him up at night.

He wants to be talking about this.

That's one.

But the other main message is he was trying to show with this release of a declassified documents the likes of which many many you know intel uh experts and former analysts say they've never seen any release like this in their careers.

Um the big message was look our elections are so insecure that essentially he needs to gain more control over it.

And so this is part of his larger campaign to gain as much control over American elections as possible.

and he has had his agencies doing many things along the way to try to take control from states which they have the constitutional authority to to control elections but take control away from them ahead of the midterms.

Right.

And what what evidence is there actually that our elections are in danger from foreign interference or from other nefarious players that Donald Trump believes exist out there?

So there's no evidence that any foreign nation has ever interfered in election in the sense that they've changed votes or affected voting machines or altered the outcome of an election.

There's no evidence at all and actually he didn't produce any.

I mean there are foreign countries who try to shape the narrative who try to intervene in our social media and try and support one candidate or another.

And ironically, the one country that has done this rather successfully and at great length over many years wasn't mentioned by Donald Trump and of course Russia who uh went out of their way to support him.

So, you know, there's no and he didn't mention them and other that there isn't any evidence.

Um there have been in our system there's a series of institutions that have been created going back decades actually that are designed to prevent foreign interference and other interference and actually the Trump administration has pretty systematically dismantled them.

Um starting with the cyber defense agency which had an election uh monitoring ability and they've shut that down.

Um there's a something called the election electronic registration information center kind of nonprofit that helped states manage their electoral roles.

Um there's an electoral election assistance commission another bipartisan commission.

I mean I could go on and on.

There are multiple things have been created to make the system safe and actually the Trump administration has pulled them apart one by one.

Um, Steve, what was the purpose of the speech casting forward?

Yeah, well, I think you framed it the right way.

I think the speech was all about looking forward the speech itself wasn't the main thing last night.

It wasn't It was about 2020, but it wasn't really about 2020.

It was about the security of elections in the past, but it wasn't really about that.

I think it was all about what's to come.

And I think it sets up what we could see from this president going forward.

If you look back at the way that President Trump has tried to intervene in elections in ways that are both, you know, uncommon, illegal, unethical, sometimes legal, um he's very concerned about the outcomes in 2026.

He doesn't want to be impeached.

He believes that if Democrats take the House, they will move to impeach him quickly.

So, he's done a number of things in his past that suggest he's very open to interfering in the elections in the months to come.

Uh people have talked about this as uh the opening shot in a campaign to regularize or normalize the idea that the Trump administration in even in the midterms will come in and um meddle in untowed ways with local elections elections of Congress.

Is that something that's worth worrying about in your mind?

Yeah, look I mean at at this point if you look back on what the president has done this stuff is not hypothetical.

It's not speculative.

You look at the fact that he, you know, has tried to seize voting machines in 2020, that he threatened his own vice president, that he called the Georgia Secretary of State and asked him to find votes so that he could win in Georgia, that he summoned a riot on January 6 to try to stop certification.

These are things the president has done.

They're extreme.

It's at at this point, if if you think it's alarmist to worry that he's going to do something, you're wrong.

It's naive to worry to to not be concerned that he won't.

And all those things are also more things he did during his first term.

This I wouldn't call it an opening salvo because since the start of the second term, he has been doing things.

The Justice Department has been threatening local elected officials with prosecution if they feel like, oh, you allowed a non-citizen voter to stay on your voter roles.

Uh the DHS just followed that up with more threats today.

So all along the way also Tulsi Gabbard going to Fulton County alongside FBI agents this term to seize ballots.

Yes, they were about 2020, but it's all about laying the groundwork for actions they may take ahead of the midterms.

Carl, I want to talk to you about what's going on on the Hill, but you're right.

It's just interesting.

It just strikes me listening to you and listening to what you just said about Tulsa Gabber.

The idea that the director of national intelligence was dispatched herself to a local voting jurisdiction in Georgia is quite quite extraordinary and sometimes we lose novel and unprecedented and we lose and that's why it came up in the hearing this week for her for her successor.

Yeah.

No, I want to ask you about that hearing.

I also want to ask you at the end of the speech, Carl, he he called for Republicans to pass the the Save America Act.

What what he's calling the Save America Act.

um doesn't seem likely that he's going to get his Save America Act.

A, what what is it?

And B, what is the general tenor of the conversations you're hearing among Republicans on the Hill about this this hard pivot to talking about 2020 and and and and forward.

The Save America Act has become a big priority of the president.

It it would change some election rules, probably make it harder for people to uh register to vote and vote, require ID, citizenship, really crack down on vote by mail, which of course is a huge thing in a lot of states.

Well, when you say citizenship, only citizens you would have to prove your citizenship to register to vote and it can make it harder for married women whose names are different and how that would be sort of enforced.

So the and it's stuck in the Senate because the Democrats don't want anything to do with this and and the Republicans despite the president's regular uh urging them to get rid of the filibuster, John Thun does not want to get rid of the filibuster.

This over this?

Yeah.

Certain or at all, but certainly not over this.

So there's a lot going on.

So today talking to Republicans, you know, they they wish the president would move on from this, right?

It's it's not going it's not going to happen.

and it's just causing them a lot of grief.

But they were also really interesting to me.

You know, we all know these big presidential set pieces usually come with a big coordinated effort with the Hill and everybody talks and the statements to bolster.

Well, the silence was deafening except for the people who said I talked to Lisa Marowski.

She's like, I'm underwhelmed by this.

It was nothing new.

John Cornin at an event said this is all old stuff.

They weren't moved by this at all.

So, you know, Republicans traditionally want states to run the elections.

They don't want the federal government to run the elections.

So, and then lastly on kind of what you were talking about, so Mark Wayne Mullen uh followed up the speech today with a briefing secretary of homeland security.

And we had been hearing a lot before the speech that the president was going to say more than he said last night because you're right, he didn't say they have changed votes.

Mark Wayne Mullen kind of picked up where Trump left off last night today saying we know countries have the ability to change votes even though I'm not sure that's true and that you know we might go out and arrest state elections officials who don't cooperate with us.

So I mean obviously well that's taking it to a another level in but he he did say it.

Now on the other hand Democrats are really preparing for this because they think this is coming.

They're all organized.

They have a lot going on to get ready for this.

I want to talk about the non the the the non-political part of that, the organization that you're talking about, but I also want to ask you about the the politics of Watch um watch this uh for a moment.

This is some Democrats talking about what's going on.

Do you deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 election?

Who won the 2020 election?

The 2020 election.

The 2020 election.

who won the 2020 election.

The point being, the Democrats seem to think that there's a way to capitalize on this obsession.

Yeah.

Um, and my question to you is how how much are they going to jiu-jitsu this in a kind of way and take that obsession and turn it against Don Oaf, who you saw there at the end from Georgia, uh, kind of expected to be a target of the speech last night and wasn't, but he has turned this into a blockbuster for him.

Uh, really kind of elevating his presence out there.

Uh, yeah.

So, I think they see this as a rallying cry.

uh you know the more that they see the admin that they can tell voters the administration's trying to take away your vote your ability to vote it rallies people they think so in some ways they think it's a benefit but they're all they're seriously concerned about what might happen after the election with seating members and uh there's a lot because I I think it's really important to think understand that this is not just about what happens before the election it's about creating a narrative about what will happen after.

And so the reason they're talking about non-citizens voting, even though study after study after study shows that almost no non-citizens ever vote, including Heritage Foundation studies, the reason they're doing that is that when they get a result they don't like, they will say non-citizens voted like we said they were going to.

So it's a preparation.

And just to me, more important than the Democrats asking was Clayton's non-answer.

Was Clayton not was essentially refusing to say that Joe Biden won the election?

And again, we are talking about DNI, director of national intelligence.

That's the position he would be in.

The current acting one, Bill Py, just like Tulsi Gabbard, he was the reason that the president went forward with releasing all of these declassified documents.

That acting director of national intelligence, all of the sources told us at MS Now, was one of the biggest advocates, constantly in the president's ear, bringing diagrams in, telling him, "We need to release these documents."

And again, yes, it's not about 2020 ultimately.

It's about justifying any actions they may take right around November, after November, all around the election.