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Mullin threatens states that refuse Trump’s election demands
Mullin also repeated his threat of withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency grant funding to states that don’t work to “secure” elections.
“If they’re not willing to do it, it should raise serious questions. It’s not that hard. This isn’t a partisan issue,” the homeland security secretary said.
This also comes after the Trump justice department sent letters to election officials in every state threatening officials with potential criminal charges if noncitizens vote.
The federal government has previously sought access to state voter rolls, which contain the personal data of millions of Americans. States have refused to turn the data over, resulting in a number of lawsuits that the administration has lost.
Key events
Aisha Down
Donald Trump’s state department intends to allocate $12m to organisations in the UK founded by the prominent Conservatives Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young, the Guardian can reveal.
The intended grants, revealed in US government documents, are part of a package of support for European groups viewed favourably by the Trump administration. Some former US officials have criticised the funding as a misuse of public money to seek influence over foreign politics.
The documents reviewed by the Guardian set out details of the grants for the first time. They include $7m for 878, a “leading British and American thinktank” devoted to “the rediscovery of our ancient culture” and “ending mass immigration”.
The 878 group lists its founding directors as Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former minister of state for Brexit opportunities, and his former special adviser Dr Radomir Tylecote, who has appeared on short-lived former prime minister Liz Truss’ YouTube show. During his appearance, he claimed: “We are not a functioning democracy at this point … it’s a worse system than in the United States.”
According to the document, the funding is justified by 878’s “unique role in the United Kingdom as … a dedicated nonpartisan organisation focused on advancing fundamental freedoms”.
Mullin threatens states that refuse Trump’s election demands
Mullin also repeated his threat of withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency grant funding to states that don’t work to “secure” elections.
“If they’re not willing to do it, it should raise serious questions. It’s not that hard. This isn’t a partisan issue,” the homeland security secretary said.
This also comes after the Trump justice department sent letters to election officials in every state threatening officials with potential criminal charges if noncitizens vote.
The federal government has previously sought access to state voter rolls, which contain the personal data of millions of Americans. States have refused to turn the data over, resulting in a number of lawsuits that the administration has lost.
Mullin repeated many of the president’s baseless conspiracy theories that he pushed on Thursday evening – particularly that voting machines are unsafe and insecure. This, despite election officials and cybersecurity experts routinely underscoring that these machines are not connected to the internet and undergo scrupulous testing before each election to make sure they haven’t been compromised.
“We know for sure that our foreign adversaries, not our allies, foreign adversaries have parts that are vital pieces in our voting machines,” Mullin said, appearing to repeat the president’s claims that the CIA obtained reporting of “a specific plot by the Maduro regime” in Venezuela” to “digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020”.
However, the vulnerability involved voting technology used in Venezuela by Smartmatic and did not extend to the US, according to the CIA analysis. Claims that Venezuela’s leadership controls electronic voting systems worldwide – including those used in the 2020 U.S. election – are part of a long‑running conspiracy theory and are not supported by credible evidence.
On Friday, Mullin said, again without evidence, that rivals can “change voter registration and your vote”.
“There’s not a question. It’s not even for debate,” he said.
Mullin holds press conference about election security after Trump address
Homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin is now holding a press conference to discuss his department’s alleged findings about election security. Donald Trump used the review compiled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as the basis of many of his unsubstantiated claims on Thursday during his televised address to the nation.
“This isn’t about rehashing the 2020 election. This is just exposing what took place, and to make sure it never happens again,” Mullin said, after the president’s speech was widely criticized for revealing no new information about the safety and security of the US elections, despite claiming that system falls “catastrophically short” of “greatness”.
Mullin claimed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) identified “250,000 non-citizens registered to vote in California, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada”. However, election experts, including David Becker, said the administration has not been “transparent about the methodology” in reaching that number.
On Thursday, several state officials from the states that Mullin mentioned responded to the administration’s claims. Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state, said that voters in the Keystone state “must take steps to verify their identity before they cast a ballot, including providing proper identification every time they register to vote, vote by mail, or vote at a new polling place.”
He added: “All evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”
Gavin Newsom shot back at the numbers compiled by DHS.
“California law is clear: You MUST be a U.S. citizen to vote state and federal elections,” the California governor’s office wrote on X. “Voter fraud is EXTREMELY RARE – and almost always committed by U.S. citizens.”
On Friday, the homeland security secretary also claimed that 28,000 non-citizens have been identified on the voter rolls of 23 red states that have “proactively” worked with the administration on the Save program –a stool implemented by DHS to verify citizenship status.
Becker noted that this number sounds plausible, but it is only 0.04% of the 68 million eligible voters in those states.
“One thing that I love about numbers, and I love about facts is they don’t lie,” Mullin told reporters today. “This isn’t something that I’m trying to tell you to spin a narrative. This is what is going on, and what we are saying is that every state should partner with us to work to secure this.”
Edward Helmore
The Trump administration has said it will drastically shorten visas for foreign journalists in the US to 240 days, down from five years, and cut those for Chinese journalists to only 90 days.
The rule announced by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will do away with the “duration of status” system, which allows foreign journalists to stay and work in the United States as long as they meet eligibility requirements.
In addition to journalists, the new visas rules will also affect foreign students and exchange visitors that the government said had also been allowed to “remain in the United States indefinitely without routine government oversight”.
“For nearly half a century, the outdated ‘duration of status’ system has compromised national security and created an environment ripe for immigration fraud,” said the DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin.
“For decades, foreign students have been admitted into the US indefinitely, allowing thousands to abuse our immigration system by perpetually enrolling in courses to avoid having to leave the US.”
By implementing “clear, finite limits” on the visas, Mullin said, the US “is reclaiming its ability to properly screen, vet and monitor individuals within our borders”.
Democrats slam Trump’s ‘pathetic attempt’ to sow doubt in election process
Several Democrats have slammed Donald Trump’s Thursday night speech where he repeated conspiracies and unfounded claims that both the 2020 election was stolen, and the current state of election integrity is compromised.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said the address was a “pathetic attempt” by the president to cast doubt on the fact that he lost the 2020 election.
The top Democrat said that Trump is evading discussing contentious policy issues, and is instead “working to rig the midterms before a single vote has even been cast”. This comes as the president’s approval rating hit 37% per recent polling – the same level as when he left office in 2021.
Schumer was also adamant that the Save America act – Trump’s voter-ID legislation which that requires proof of citizenship in order to register to vote – “isn’t going anywhere” in Congress.
“The courts have rejected it, Congress has rejected it, even members of your own party have rejected it – give it up,” Schumer said in a statement.
Other Democratic lawmakers mocked the president’s logic.
“Trump says Democrats forgot to rig the election in 2016, successfully rigged it while *he* was president in 2020, then forgot how to rig it again in 2024. So the only election Democrats supposedly stole was the one he himself controlled,” said Massachusetts congressman Jim McGovern. “You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bullshit.”
Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster and critic of the president, said that Trump is “preemptively working to delegitimize America’s elections”. Meanwhile, Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chair, said there is “one simple reason” Trump and his GOP allies continue to “lay the groundwork” for interfering in the November elections.
“Republicans know they’re going to lose the midterms,” Martin said in a statement.
Fatcheck: elections expert explains how secure voting machines are
During his speech, Donald Trump also repeated his unsubstantiated claims that voting machines, used to tabulate ballots, are “vulnerable” and “easily compromised”.
Part of the declassified document dump that the White House released last night included details that Venezuela was trying to take advantage of a vulnerability in a voting system used in the country, but not in the US. As my colleague Aram Roston has reported, it’s part of a long-running conspiracy theory that Venezuela’s leadership controls electronic voting software worldwide and caused his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden. A key part of the debunked claims is that Smartmatic, which had the contract for electronic voting machines in Los Angeles, and Dominion, which ran voting in many other parts of the country, had been created or influenced by Venezuela to fix elections. A reminder that a judge in 2023 ruled that several conservative news outlets had to pay hundred hundreds of millions in total damages in defamation claims for airing baseless accusations about these voting machine companies.
“Like every piece of technology, our voting machines are not invulnerable to attack,” Becker noted. But this is the reason why there are “systems by design that confirm and verify everything those machines do”.
Becker underscored that voting machines are not connected to the internet, they are kept under intense security and they are tested before each election.
He also noted that every voter in the US, with the exception of Louisiana, votes on paper ballots. “Those paper ballots are auditable. Every state conducts audits,” Becker said. “They check and make sure through hand audits, reading the ballots, confirming the counts by hand under transparent observation … They do that transparently in public, and then they compare it to the machine count to make sure it worked.”
Factcheck: elections expert debunks Trump speech claims
Speaking to reporters today, David Becker – the executive director of the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation & Research – said that Trump’s speech was ultimately “a dud”.
“There was absolutely nothing here that was news. Nothing here that even calls into question past elections. Certainly not the 2020 election,” Becker added.
On some of the president’s more specific claims of foreign election interference, namely that China obtained 220m voter records from the period of from 2020 to 2023, Becker said that it’s a known fact that China “has a policy of vacuuming up as much American data as it can”.
However, voter data is some of the easiest to obtain because each state has a public voter file. Those can often be purchased, or even retrieved off the internet in some states. These files have existed since the beginning of voter registration in the US, Becker notes.
He also said the key allegation from the Trump administration that China could vote on behalf of people is “100% false”.
“I could have a list of all the students at a particular university. That doesn’t mean I can change their grades, and that’s what’s happening here. Just having the data doesn’t give you an ability to access their voter record,” Becker said. “You need many, many more private, personally identifiable information points, things like driver’s license numbers, dates of birth, social security numbers, which aren’t in this data.”
Trump also took to Truth Social today to claim that there were “great reviews” of his address to the nation on Thursday – where he repeated baseless claims undermining the electoral integrity of the 2020 election, and the safety of the election process at large in the US.
During his speech, Trump also tried to unveil new information – with scant evidence – that China’s interfered in the race that he lost to Joe Biden. This despite assessments from intelligence officials that no foreign actor, including China, attempted to alter any technical aspect of the 2020 voting process.
Donald Trump will start his day in Washington. Later, the president will travel to New York to attend a Fifa reception at 5:20pm ET — ahead of the World Cup final on Sunday. We’ll bring you the latest lines as he sets off.
‘Brazen corruption’: critics denounce Trump Media plan to sell priority access to Truth Social posts
Mark Sweney
Donald Trump’s media company is planning to charge for special high-speed access to Truth Social posts, including possibly his own, affecting national security and financial markets.
The move announced on Thursday would allow Wall Street trading firms and other institutions to get news first from top Truth Social contributors so they could profit off subsequent moves in stocks, bonds and interest rates.
Called Truth PSI, the new service comes amid a flurry of other deals by Trump and his family company that critics say are exploiting the presidency for profit.
It follows similar offers of paid access on rival platforms, although with one key difference: the most popular Truth Social poster is the president himself, and, as the biggest shareholder of the publicly traded parent company, he would benefit directly.
“He’s selling expedited, privileged access to information about what he is doing as president,” said Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law and an expert in government conflict of interest rules. “It’s yet more brazen corruption, an improper exploitation of government power to enrich himself.”
The debate about how old is too old to serve in public office has resurfaced this week after the shock death of the Republican Lindsey Graham and the surprise return of Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old senator who published a photo of himself in hospital after a long absence from the spotlight.
With rumors continuing to swirl around Donald Trump’s health, why is it that US politicians seem to cling on to power for so long?
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland speaks to Alexis Coe, a presidential historian and columnist for the New York Times Book Review, about whether the US is becoming a gerontocracy.
Kremlin says Russia has never interfered in US elections
When asked about the unverified comments made by Donald Trump, who on Thursday accused China of interfering in the 2020 presidential election, the Kremlin said Russia has never interfered in US elections, Reuters reports.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Moscow categorically rejected all allegations of past election meddling.
A 2021 US intelligence community assessment determined that Russia conducted influence operations aimed at denigrating Biden’s campaign – but concluded that no foreign actor, China included, attempted to alter any technical aspect of the 2020 voting process.
Our China correspondent Amy Hawkins has provided some context Donald Trump’s unverified claims that China interfered with the 2020 presidential election:
Trump’s remarks were at odds with the conciliatory tone he has struck with Beijing since he travelled to China to meet Xi Jinping in May. The Chinese president has been invited to Washington in September.
A 2021 US intelligence community assessment concluded that no foreign actor, including China, attempted to alter any technical aspect of the 2020 voting process. The report said that while Russia had conducted influence operations aimed at denigrating Biden’s campaign, China did not deploy any interference efforts intended to change the outcome of the election.
US intelligence assessed that China did not see either a Trump or a Biden victory as advantageous to Beijing and it was therefore not worth the risk of damaging the US-China relationship with interference efforts.
China has long denied claims by western governments, including the UK, that it has meddled in the politics of other countries. Several European countries have raised the alarm about Chinese spying operations in their legislatures. Last year a former parliamentary aide for Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party was convicted of spying for China.
Trump prompts constitutionality concerns over his call to revoke broadcast licenses
Several major networks declined to air Donald Trump’s primetime televised address on Thursday, citing concerns that the content could be politically partisan or inflammatory.
CNN, ABC and NBC chose not to air the speech live, but CBS, Fox News and MS Now (formerly MSNBC) aired at least large portions of the speech live. Some ABC station station affiliates – including the Washington DC station owned by right-leaning broadcaster Sinclair – also chose to air the speech.
“We’ll be monitoring what the president says tonight, as we always do, but aren’t taking it live, given the president has a well-documented history of saying blatantly false things about elections,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, the network’s 9pm anchor, told viewers on Thursday.
Although television networks are not are not legally obliged to grant a president’s request to air a speech live – Joe Biden and Barack Obama had requests for White House speeches to be broadcast live refused during their presidencies – the move drew rebukes from Trump, who called for their broadcast licenses to be revoked.
“Too many Americans have fought and died to defend American democracy,” Bernie Sanders, a Democratic senator from Vermont, posted on X. “All of us, regardless of our political views, must stand together against this dangerous president who is seeking to undermine our Constitution and our basic freedoms.”
More here:
How Trump’s address was bluntly aimed at destabilizing the US electoral system
Sam Levine
Donald Trump used the imprimatur of the presidency and United States intelligence agencies to try to undermine confidence in American elections in a presidential address on Thursday that seemed bluntly aimed at laying the groundwork for further destabilizing the electoral system before November’s midterm elections.
In his address from the East Room at the White House, Trump attempted to give the impression that his administration had uncovered new bombshell findings about vulnerabilities in the US’s election system. China, he claimed, had illicitly acquired voter information on 220 million Americans (many states allow anyone to buy voter roll information; Trump did not say the means by which the nation acquired the data). He claimed that China interfered in other ways to undermine his 2020 campaign and that the information had been suppressed by intelligence officials.
Donald Trump repeated calls in his Thursday speech for the passage of the Save America Act – a rebranded and expanded version of last year’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) act, which passed in the US House but didn’t get a vote in the Senate.
This year’s version includes a very strict voter ID requirement for casting a ballot and a provision that requires states to regularly turn their voter rolls over to the Department of Homeland Security, in addition to criminal liability for election officials who register a voter without proper documentary proof of citizenship.
Last month, US federal court blocked an attempt by Trump to bypass Congress on the Save Act via executive order. This week, House Republicans reupped their efforts to resurrect the bill by linking the measure to an unrelated spending bill and passing both largely along party lines.
After Thursday’s speech, Republicans voiced their support of the Save Act, with representatives like Tim Burchett of Tennessee urging Americans to call their senators.
“We are going to lose our country if we don’t pass the dadgum Save America Act,” Burchett posted on X. “Call your senator and tell them to save our great nation.”
Democrats began denouncing the Save Act even before Trump took to the podium, with Kamala Harris, the former vice-president and the defeated Democratic candidate in the 2024 presidential election, leading the charge.
“Here is what you need to know: The 2020 election was not stolen; we won and he lost,” she wrote on social media. “The Save Act is voter suppression. It is part of a larger agenda of conservatives trying to steal power from the people.”
The denounciations continued after his speech.
“Tonight, Donald Trump reminded us again just how desperate he is to steal the midterm elections. The so-called Save America Act isn’t about stopping fraud, it’s about stopping voters,” JB Pritzker, governor of Illinois, posted on X.
“After listening to the president’s rambling address, I want him to know that the Save America Act is going NOWHERE in the Senate,” Patty Murray, a Democatric senator from Washington state, posted on X. “It belongs in the trash with the rest of Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories. America, use your vote and your voice to save our democracy.”
Read more about the Save Act here:
China, Democrats decry Trump’s latest unverified claims of election interference
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of US politics.
Donald Trump used a 25-minute primetime televised address on Thursday to make unverified claims about China interfering with the 2020 presidential election and cast extraordinary doubts on the integrity of the US electoral process.
However, the heavily redacted documents released by the White House, purportedly to support the president’s allegations, appeared to undercut the idea that China intended to interfere in the 2020 election – claims which had already been investigated by intelligence officials, who concluded with high confidence in 2021 that China “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US presidential election”.
On Friday, China’s foreign ministry said the accusations were “pure fabrication” and amounted to “a malicious smear campaign”, Reuters reports.
Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian told reporters at a briefing that Beijing has no interest in interfering with US elections and has never done so. “We urge the US to take a long, hard look at itself and stop making unfounded accusations against China,” the spokesperson said.
Democrats were also quick to decry Trump’s messaging, with Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia and vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, saying that the president’s speech “was just lies and long-debunked conspiracies”.
“This is all just a prelude to interfere in our midterms — don’t fall for it,” Warner posted on X.
“If Trump wins, it’s a fair election. If he loses, there was fraud. Does he realize the election he’s talking about happened under his watch as President? The only reason Trump is bringing this up now is to distract from the fact he’s failed to make Americans’ lives better,” Mark Kelly, a Democratic senator from Arizona, posted on X.
More to come.
