GEOFF BENNETT: Welcome to the "News Hour."

President Trump will speak tonight from the White House, where he is expected to make new claims about foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election.

The speech marks an escalation of his yearslong effort to relitigate the election he lost.

His repeated false claims about the 2020 vote have been rejected by courts, election officials, and independent assessments, which found no evidence of widespread fraud.

Our White House correspondent, Liz Landers, joins us now with a preview.

So, Liz, you have been reporting on this since the president announced this speech earlier this week.

What is he expected to say tonight?

LIZ LANDERS: The president is saying that this is going to be really, really big news.

And he went on to say on Tuesday that "It doesn't get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don't have a country."

Karoline Leavitt also gave a bit of a preview during the press briefing earlier today.

KAROLINE LEAVITT, White House Press Secretary: We should have the safest and most secure elections in the history of the world.

And what the president will be speaking about tonight will show you that perhaps that is not the case.

And we need to make some adjustments moving forward, including the SAVE America Act.

LIZ LANDERS: Geoff, elections in this country are very safe and secure, and voter fraud is incredibly rare.

So, based on what we have heard from the president in the past, it seems that he may repeat falsehoods about the 2020 election, as he has done repeatedly.

Nick Schifrin and I are hearing from sources that the president is expected to claim foreign election interference from China in the 2020 elections.

Sources that we're speaking to say that there are thousands of pages of intelligence documents that the president is going to point to as evidence of this.

And we should also expect the president to mention some of the key swing states that he lost, like Georgia, during this speech later this evening.

GEOFF BENNETT: And the president has remained fixated on this 2020 election loss.

Many of the claims he's expected to repeat tonight have been repeatedly refuted, including by members of his own administration.

Walk us through that history.

LIZ LANDERS: His own administration in 2020, as you just said, put out a number of intelligence assessments after that election looking into whether there was foreign interference and meddling in that.

John Ratcliffe was the director of national intelligence in 2020.

He is now the CIA director.

And there was a DNI report that was released that I think there are two key points here that we should review.

This was given to President Trump in January of 2021.

It says: "There are no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S.

elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results."

This assessment also said this of China -- quote -- "China did not deploy interference efforts and considered, but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S.

presidential election."

On the other hand Geoff, the intelligence community did assess that President Putin of Russia tried to influence the 2020 elections to denigrate President Biden, and Iran tried to influence the elections to denigrate candidate Trump.

So here's what the president's own attorney general, Bill Barr, said when he spoke to the January 6 Committee when he was asked about these non-truths, these conspiracies from the president.

WILLIAM BARR, Former U.S.

Attorney General: I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public, that there was this systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn't count, and that these machines controlled by somebody else were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense.

LIZ LANDERS: And Attorney General Barr was not the only Cabinet official or adviser of the presidents from 2020 who apparently said this to him.

There were a number of Republicans and close advisers to Trump who said to the January 6 Committee a few years ago that they told the president that these were not true conspiracies that he was hearing.

GEOFF BENNETT: I know, as part of your reporting, you have been speaking with election officials around the country.

What are they telling you about this?

LIZ LANDERS: I have spoken with probably a half-dozen election officials in the last few days since this announcement came out, and they're concerned.

They're concerned about what the president is going to say tonight and how it may undermine people's confidence in the upcoming midterm elections.

I spoke with one Republican in a swing state who said to me yesterday that every Republican that they're talking to says that the last thing that they need to be talking about as a party is voting machines in the 2020 election.

This person said: "We as a party need to talk about affordability and other issues that are important to the public."

I spoke with another election official in Arizona who's watching this speech closely, because Arizona has primary races on Tuesday of this week.

And this person said: "I don't know what the president is going to say and whether this will somehow impact our election administration next week."

And then, finally, the secretary of state of Arizona, Adrian Fontes, and I spoke on the phone yesterday.

And he made the point that the president and this administration keep challenging the way that elections are administered, these mail ballot challenges that we have seen, these executive orders about turning over election data.

He says: "This administration keeps losing these challenges in court."

And he thinks that this speech tonight will be another futile attempt to influence an area that the president and the executive branch has no influence over.

GEOFF BENNETT: Liz Landers, thank you, as always, for this terrific reporting.

We appreciate it.

LIZ LANDERS: Of course.

GEOFF BENNETT: Well, you can watch PBS News' livestreaming coverage of President Trump's prime-time address tonight at 9:00 p.m.

Eastern on our Web site with context and real-time fact-checking from our partners at PolitiFact.

That's at PBS.org/NewsHour.