Officials debated White House push to declassify documents amid Trump campaign to sow election mistrust, sources say
By Kevin Liptak, Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen, Tierney Sneed, CNN
(CNN) — Trump administration officials have intensely debated the White House’s push to declassify certain documents related to alleged foreign interference in US elections, a move many see as part of a push by President Donald Trump to sow mistrust in the system and undercut his 2020 loss, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
The declassification process is being run in part by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, led by former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, sources said. Nunes is working with Kurt Olsen, the White House official who is spearheading broader efforts to try to re-investigate election results in 2020 and examine possible interference by foreign adversaries. John Solomon, a political commentator and journalist, also joined the White House last month to help review and declassify documents.
Agencies involved in the process insisted they are working closely together. An ODNI official told CNN that Bill Pulte, the former housing official recently named as the acting director of national intelligence, has been closely coordinating with CIA Director John Ratcliffe on declassifying material ahead of Trump’s speech. A CIA spokesperson said Ratcliffe “has been forward leaning in support of the President’s transparency effort with Acting Director Pulte.”
CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.
Trump is scheduled to deliver a primetime address Thursday night on foreign efforts to influence elections. The substance of Trump’s speech has been closely held, and advisers have intensely debated what should be included, according to people familiar with the plans.
Olsen had been given access to information from National Security Agency and CIA systems related to the 2020 election, CNN has previously reported. He has been heavily involved behind the scenes in the declassification discussions and planning leading up to Trump’s address.
CIA and NSA officials have been wary of Olsen’s intentions since he was first brought into the Trump administration. Both agencies have provided information about 2020 to Olsen, sources have told CNN, but so far his scope has been limited to that election.
Alongside Trump’s speech, the White House has been weighing whether to release a cache of documents related to, among other topics, China and its role in US elections, people familiar with the matter said. The prospect of declassifying certain information related to Venezuela and China’s alleged election interference efforts was among the topics that officials debated.
During his short tenure as acting DNI, Pulte has “had his head down, focused on declassifications,” one US official said. Trump gave Pulte the mandate to declassify intelligence that Trump claims would validate his longtime and baseless claims that foreign adversaries interfered in the 2020 election, tipping the scale in favor of Joe Biden.
The White House has granted Pulte authority to unilaterally declassify information without approval from or consulting with other US intelligence agencies — including CIA, multiple sources told CNN.
Intelligence agencies and the FBI have spent weeks working to prepare documents related to the US election systems and possible vulnerabilities that have long been known.
Many of the documents are based on intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency, including intercepts that show that China, Russia and other adversaries have sought to collect information on US voters and voting systems.
Not all administration officials are on board with the effort. Some worry declassifying wide swaths of information could provide a muddled picture of American voting security and undermine confidence in elections. And others fear the information could risk jeopardizing intelligence collection methods.
None of the documents gathered are expected to show any indication that breaches compromised results of elections. To carry out any actual impact on voting results, adversaries would need an army of operatives to physically access machines and make changes, according to people familiar with the intelligence. That hasn’t happened.
In 2021, an intelligence report released by the ODNI, at the time led by Ratcliffe, concluded that “we have no indication that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 election, including voter registrations, casting ballots, vote tabulation or reporting results.”
Intelligence agencies have said China obtained US voter records. Some of the same records are available publicly for sale to candidates running campaigns. But the same ODNI report said that “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.”
Ahead of Trump’s Thursday night speech, drafts prepared for the president focused on vulnerabilities in the voting systems, not that any election was hacked, sources said. Ratcliffe and FBI Director Kash Patel are expected to attend the speech.
Patel in recent weeks has ordered the FBI to surge personnel to investigate claims of voting irregularities in Georgia and other states. But inside the FBI, some officials are concerned that the evidence to support opening investigations is thin and mostly rely on reports provided by Olsen and other Trump allies who have been making the same fraud claims since 2020. Audits conducted in Georgia and other states haven’t supported claims of fraud sufficient to have changed the election results.
When the president delivers his remarks Thursday night, several state election officials — including from the 2020 battleground states that were the chief targets of Trump’s ire — will be attending a dinner at Mount Rushmore as part of an annual summer conference for the National Association of Secretaries of State. Some worry that Trump might sow doubt about future elections.
Attendees of the conference shared theories of what he might allege, while game-planning how they might respond.
“We’re very nervous, because we don’t know what he’s going to say,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat who will take over as NASS’ president at the end of the week, told CNN. “I mean, we can assume that he’s gonna say certain crazy things.”
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, told CNN he hoped to tune out the speech while at the dinner, but added: “We are getting into a window where I have to caution people who want any kind of major changes in an election process, I think it causes more problems.”
This developing story has been updated.
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CNN’s Abigail Roedersheimer contributed to this report.
