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Hey, folks. Did you know that Senator Chuck Schumer was booed at a New York City Pride parade? Whether you knew that or not may actually depend on where you get your news. According to Ground News, if you primarily read left-leaning or centrist news sources, you're dramatically less likely to have seen that story than if you mostly rely on conservative news sources. That's one of the reasons I use Ground News. Ground News, in addition to being the sponsor of this episode of the Lawfare Podcast, is an app that lets you jump out of your media bubbles and see the blind spots that exist in whatever media ecosystem you operate. Ground News doesn't just show you what the news is. It shows you who's reporting the news, how many news sources are covering it, and how coverage is distributed across the political spectrum. And it gives you insights into where your own blind spots might be based on the sources you actually read. The blind spot feed is one of my favorite features because it highlights stories that are receiving disproportionate attention from one side of the media ecosystem relative to others. I also appreciate that it doesn't stop at showing you who covered a story. Brown News also shows how many outlets reported the story, how coverage breaks down ideologically, who owns each publication and the factuality and bias ratings for those outlets. For example, Ground News shows that there are 50 different sources reporting that Oman warned allies that ships going through the Straits of Hormuz might have to pay a fee, and the headlines are quite different depending on where you look. From right-leaning news sources, you get headlines like ships face voluntary charges under plan for post-war Hormuz. From more left-leaning outlets, you get headlines like Oman tells allies ships going through Hormuz may have to pay. And further, Brown News shows that only 19% of the news organizations covering the story are left-leaning, and only 12% are centrist. 69% of the news sources covering it are conservative. In other words, you're much less likely to have encountered that story if you primarily read left-leaning outlets than if you read conservative media. Ground news helps you jump out of your media bubbles and get closer to the ground truth. It's not a publisher, and it's much more than an aggregator. It's a combination of a rating system and a focused look at who is reporting what. I have to say I was skeptical of it at first, but I've come to appreciate it. Like Lawfare, Ground News is about bringing you high-quality information that you can figure out what to do with.

For me, the most valuable feature is simply discovering the stories I probably would have missed because of my own media habits. So check out Ground News and subscribe to the Vantage Plan for 40% off, which gives you unlimited access to a better way to read the news. visit groundnews.com slash law. That's groundnews.com slash law. One last time, it's really worth checking out groundnews.com slash law. And we're live. It is Friday, the 17th of July, 2026. It is 11 a.m. in Washington, D.C. I'm Benjamin Wittes, Editor-in-Chief of Lawfare, and you are watching Lawfare Live. And we are here today to decompress the president's speech, and I am here with three Lawfare senior editors, Molly Roberts, Renee DiResta, and Mike Feinberg, and there are a number of aspects of the speech. accompanying document release that we are going to go over today. The first of them, Molly, is that there is less to it than we were maybe expecting or at least expecting in the sort of worst case scenario. What were the fears and what was the reality? Sure. So I would say, for me at least,

there were two main fears, one of which felt more likely than the other coming in. One of them was, is he going to issue an executive order after he does this that declares a national emergency based on the alleged foreign interference and then seeks to achieve a number of things through that executive order? So all the components of the SAVE Act, which, of course, Ultimately, he just said, pass the SAVE Act. That's a lot less dramatic than issuing an executive order that seeks to do that unilaterally, which he's done before, by the way. This would be doing that under a different new pretext. And two, that he would declassify information that was very new, that people hadn't seen before, and that maybe might get given some credence, at least as people tried to pick it apart. There was no executive order. So that's part one. That was less concerning than what could have happened. And then what he declassified was not new at all. There were some documents we hadn't seen before, but the claims were largely recycled claims and pretty much everything in there, as I imagine that Mike and Renee can speak to, has either already been debunked thoroughly or is easily debunkable or debunks itself. A lot of these documents essentially say the opposite of what the president characterized them as saying.

Yeah, it's not really themselves that they debunk. They debunk the point for which they are being cited. Give us an example of that.

Yeah. So a lot of this is in the 2020 declassified and 2021 intelligence community assessment. The majority finding was that China didn't seek to influence or interfere in the election. And then there was a minority view in that that said, well, we agree they didn't seek to interfere. We think they might have taken some more steps to influence than the majority thinks. So a lot of what's in these documents is kind of expanded versions of that analysis. But even when you look at that, it still doesn't say that China sought to interfere. And even when you look at those, the influence efforts, it doesn't it essentially says that Beijing calibrated its efforts not to be as aggressive as it could be. and it is not as clear as certainly the president made it sound when he said stuff like they wanted you to think that your president wasn't the hottest president out there, but actually your president is doing a really great job. It's not even clear that that was the primary message that they were trying to send. So that would be one example. But there are other examples, certainly when it comes to the compromise of voter registration data, the way the president and presented it made it seem like there was some nefarious hack. And then when you look at the documents, it's clear that these were, at least in many cases, commercially acquired, which is easy

to do. They're commercially available in a lot of cases. What do we, so at this point, are we kind of in the clear for the November election? We don't have a national emergency. We've got, you You know, no announcement that there are going to be ICE troops stationed at the polling stations to arrest all the illegals who won't be voting. And, you know, and we haven't seen any voting machines seized or ordered to be seized. So has everybody who's been concerned about the integrity of November been suffering from Trump derangement syndrome? or is there still some basis for concern? Yeah, I think we're all good now. We can

just pack up and be done with it. No, I don't think people's concerns are assuaged. It's obviously better that there wasn't a national emergency declaration issued yesterday. It's obviously better that machines haven't been seized yet or that he hasn't said, oh, these machines I'm decertifying, which would not be something that he can legally do, but he might claim he's doing it anyway. That's better than those things having happened. But One, none of this means that those things won't happen. And two, it's really bad to have the president making a primetime address where he's alleging vast foreign interference.

interference, bombshell revelations that are false. And those allegations that he is ceding now, he could certainly seek to raise again later. He could do it after the election when he sees results aren't going his way. He could go in and seize machines. He could, I mean, that's probably the most kind of aggressive and concrete thing he could do on the heels of the election based on that. But also what he could do is he could say, just in seeking to make claims of fraud, I alerted the states to these problems with my speech. I showed them they had vulnerabilities. He says he's going to work with the states to resolve the vulnerabilities. They didn't resolve these vulnerabilities. They didn't listen to me. And great. Now there was fraud in the elections. Now we have a stolen election because they didn't listen to me. So I'm certainly concerned about that. I'm concerned about the investigation of this. He says there was a cover-up of these things. The documents show there was not a cover-up of any of this, but he says there was. I'm concerned about the investigations of that within the intelligence community. They lead to more purges in the intel community, and it's more easily politicizable. I don't think that's good. And I'm concerned also about the way that these investigations might play into the persecution of his political enemies.

All right. Let's talk about the substance of what he said, Rene, because, you know, he made a set of substantial allegations that a whole lot of people like you, both inside the government and outside the government have been, you know, lying about, you know, foreign election interference and that there really is foreign election interference, but it's China, not the folks that you're concerned about. So let's talk about the truth and falsehood of the substance of the things that he said. Give us an overview of like what the president said and what we should make of it.

So one of the things that was so surprising about it for me was that he made these allegations, but there was a there's nothing, again, much like the Tulsi Gabbard declassification theater, there is nothing there to back it up. That's not the surprising part. The surprising part is that they didn't have more when they chose to do this very large address. And so I think in that particular regard, what you're really seeing is a desire to shape a narrative before anybody has the time to go through the documents. That's a very common thing that we've seen now. It's been known for a very long time that China did not favor Trump. It's been known that China collects information. It's been known that they have the ability to target but did not appear to have targeted. None of this is new or revelatory. What happened last night was the amalgamation, the kind of the munging together of four completely different disparate data sets to create an impression that there was a lot of smoke. And if there's smoke, there must be fire. None of the data sets related to each other and none of the data sets within the individual data sets support the broad overarching claims of fraud. One thing we did see that was very interesting, is that there was actually a little snippet about how Russia was interfering to denigrate Biden, you know. So ironically, you know, you're sort of proving this other thing that they've denied for a very long time. You referenced those of us on the outside, you know, and those of us inside the government and outside the government both came to the same conclusion independently and put it out in 2020 about the influence efforts that were happening. When the administration came back to power, they dismantled all of the in-government efforts that were responsible for finding that stuff, right? So they dismantled Foreign Influence Task Force. They dismantled the ODNI Foreign Malign Influence Center. They attacked CISA. They claimed that evidence of foreign interference or claims of foreign interference were really a vast cover to conceal mass censorship of conservatives. And then they came at those of us in the private sector with subpoenas and lawsuits to try to backstop that allegation. Those allegations are also collapsing now. You know, they're being defeated in court. But these are not the actions of an administration seriously concerned about foreign interference. They're the actions of an administration concerned about advancing its political agenda.

I'm muted. All right. So if you had to identify the three most important things that they are trying to propagate that aren't true, what would you say are the big takeaways, you know, the lies, the damn lies and the statistics?

I think the big lie of this moment...

is that elections are insecure somehow. And again, the, you know, CISA has come out and pointed out vulnerabilities in election machines and infrastructure in the past and argued for strengthening our defenses. That's not a controversial proposition. I think that the direction that they potentially will try to take it is to take that real fact and then to twist it into something, alleging that this means that our elections in 2026 are significantly vulnerable and they are not, or that past elections were unreliable. And that is also not true.

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Mike, one thing the president did in connection with this speech was declassified a bunch of stuff. I want to start with the question, you know, on the, it is never good to declassify material for partisan political purposes, but sometimes it is worse than other times. I mean, it's always bad, but you can, you know, if you're really reckless about it, you can really do a lot of damage. So let's start with, from a pure intelligence point of view, how much damage did the president do with reckless, politically motivated declassifications yesterday?

I think there's really two types of damage that we need to focus on. And I'm sort of going to glide over the one that's been covered by a lot of other people, which is generally, you don't want to leverage the government's ability to collect intelligence for political gain simply because it causes people, it erodes trust in government institutions and processes. You know, there's at least three articles in The Atlantic as of this morning covering this, and it's not a particularly complicated argument, but there's a second-order consequence that is not getting a lot of coverage that I think is worth noting. And it speaks to the United States's ability to gain intelligence in the future. People only give you secrets if they think you are capable and willing to protect. Spies who report on foreign activities for the benefit of the United States are quite literally risking their lives every time they pass over secrets. And if they start to worry that at some point their reporting is going to get out in public, their second concern is, is there enough identifying information in that reporting? Even if it doesn't use my name, that's going to allow the people I'm spying against to identify me, arrest me, and probably kill me. So every time you declassify something for what I have no problem calling an illegitimate,

politicized reason, or even when you do it with justification sometimes, you are creating a subtle or gross disincentive for people to pass on secrets to us in the future. So what we saw last night was maybe unintentional, maybe purposeful, but a very real handicapping of our future

intelligence collection abilities. Mute. So talk to us about China, because there are some characterizations of Chinese intelligence operations or Chinese influence operations in there. You're a Chinese counterintelligence guy. What do you make of them? I think the

entirety of this speech either misunderstood or purposely mischaracterized how the Chinese intelligence services operate. There is a tendency in public discourse, and this even occurs within the government when you have people who are not accustomed to dealing with the intelligence agencies, there's a tendency to default to Cold War assumptions. Namely, that intelligence services are like what Russia had in the days of the NKVD and KGB, where things are highly centralized. And if a Soviet operative was doing something, it was at the direction of Moscow Center. And there is a degree of that if you dig into the academic literature, whether the things published by the Jamestown Foundation or individual scholars like Peter Mattis or Professor Sheila Brighton's, that indicates that does occur in China. But what you also see is a Chinese intelligence community that is decentralized to a degree that has no analog in the United States, where individual departments and provincial bureaus operate with a significant amount of latitude and independence that, say, an FBI field office or a CIA station would never have. And there's abundant evidence of this in public. There was an indictment in 2022 or 2023 against an organization called the 512 Working Group, which was a subdivision within the Ministry of Public Security that was doing really ham-fisted influence operations. And there is no evidence proffered that this was done at the request or direction of some central authority within the larger MPS. Similarly, we know from a long-running series of indictments on Chinese cyber actors that they fundamentally outsource a lot of their work. It's not always even done by the intelligence services.

But what did the president say that this model of how Chinese intelligence actually works challenges?

What he said is that there was a fundamental coordinated effort to interfere with the election. There is nothing that he stated or contained in the document release to indicate that. There is some information that China attempted to influence American political opinion, and that's in the indictment I referenced. But it's important to note that this was often disorganized, and it's oftentimes more for a domestic Chinese audience than it actually is for the U.S. polity. If you look at the evidence offered for Chinese influence operations, a lot of times the social media postings are actually in Mandarin. So these aren't geared towards Joe Q citizen in the United States always.

It's really, you know, it's key battleground states where, you know, that middle 10 percent that swings back and forth between Republican and Democrat is native Mandarin speaking. Yeah, it's pretty prevalent in the Ross Belt.

We saw a lot in 2022 and on the outside looking at the social media efforts of them targeting diaspora communities. And the themes from the same accounts would talk about COVID. They would talk about Taiwan. They would talk about Hong Kong. We have a really killer graphic that we made at one point just sort of lighting up the topics over time and how the network shifted what it was talking about. because it was just a function of using the same account. to message about all the issues of interest to China, as opposed to what you see from Russia, which is much more sustained, integrated, significant efforts to masquerade as plausible accounts, to engage deeply within a community, to go deep, and then to move into political conversations at timely moments and really to focus on very particular agenda items. The Chinese accounts, it's hard to overstate just how spammy they actually are. Per Mike's point, they'll sometimes, you know, they'll be posting in China, in Chinese, in Mandarin. And you will see, again, our assumption was always that perhaps that was an effort to reach diaspora communities that might be resonant to some of what they were saying. And otherwise, it's just extraordinary sloppiness from local operators who are probably communicating to their bosses that they posted a certain number of posts per day as opposed to focusing on impact or effect.

Molly, we don't do pure political analysis at Lawfare, but I want to ask you to speculate a little bit about something that kind of veers into the political. Um, I look at a speech like this and I say, what the hell does he think he's doing? Right. It's not, uh, I can't imagine there's a big swing vote out there contemplating voting in the midterms. That's like, well, I'm going to vote for the Republican if China interfered in the 2020 election. But if it was pure, I'm then I'm really upset about Iran and I'm going to, you know, I like I don't understand what the political advantage to him of this behavior is. other than sort of throwing a lot of smoke in the air. Can you make a method out of the madness or is the real explanation here being he's very angry, things feel out of control, and when that happens, he goes back to election conspiracy theories and indicts Jim Comey? Like, what's the – what do you think the – I guess it's not politics, it's psychology. How do you understand what he thinks he's doing here?

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Yeah, the other thing he does when he's really angry is a bunch of strange construction projects around D.C., but those aren't going super great at the moment. Exactly. So, yeah, can I make a method out of the madness? I don't know. I think that there are a few things. so one would be there's a certain amount of message testing going on you know you said throw a bunch of smoke in the air i thought you were going to say throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks and i think there is some element of okay what's going to stick here not are we going to sway public opinion people who didn't believe this before but of people who believe this of people who get fired up about this amplify it on social media what do they like here so i think that that might be part of it. Again, I don't think he can really have any hope of swaying public opinion in any meaningful way. So that might be part of it. The other part of it, again, might be that he isn't sure yet what he's going to do when the midterms roll around or when 2028 rolls around, but that it is convenient to be establishing any pretext that you might want to use later, however flimsy now. And so I think that some of it is that. And I think this probably isn't the only declassification we're going to see. It is the first of what's to come. And then, yeah, I think he's angry. And I think that he believes it. And I think that he wants to be told that the election was stolen from him. He asked his people to show him more that the election was stolen from him. They've portrayed this in ways to him that make it seem like there's more there there than there is. I highly doubt he went through and read all these documents himself. So yeah, he's saying, I think, very possibly what he either completely believes or at least

partly believes. What do you think, Mike? Is this ultimately just a temper tantrum of a destructive dimension, or is there something more to it than that?

I think there's something more to it than that. I think what we are seeing is what people like Renee and I would characterize were this coming from a foreign government as an influence operation or a disinformation campaign. I think what we saw was the opening salve, though, in an attempt to create confusion among certain segments of the population about whether our elections are above board. And it is very difficult, given other events that are going on, to not assume that that is in service of complicating the 2026 midterms. I think we're going to see more. I don't think this is geared towards swing voters. And this is partly speculation on my part, but also partly seeing how foreign services operate. I think what we're doing is creating confusion and incentives for a small segment of the population who are adept at causing mass chaos to react to election results they don't like in a manner, quite frankly, that we saw on January 6th. I think we're looking at a long-term effort to sow chaos, which will be used in the immediate aftermath of the election to justify measures we have not previously seen in the United States on

the part of the fact. Rene, what do you think the goal is here, the strategy to the extent that you credit it as a strategy, but is it a temper tantrum? Is it an effort to set up post-election in action and condition the electorate? Like, what is it? I tend to agree with Mike. I think

it is an effort to lay the groundwork to make arguments about insecurity in 2026 and to shape, to reinforce the public opinion that he has created among his base about interference and rigging and things being stolen previously. I think the fact that you saw the Michigan content in the data set and the voter rolls content in the data set, he made a couple of comments about. Slow down and specify what those are. So the Michigan content, I have not read that complete data set, but that one, as I understand it, relates to an investigation the FBI conducted into a specific group that I believe was doing voter registrations. Molly might have a little bit more information on the Michigan side of it. The voter roll thing is putting out the allegation that in a certain number of states, there are approximately 200,000 or so illegal voters on the rolls. It's not totally clear from the data how that attribution was made, but these are the arguments that we're hearing. My sense of it, as I listened to him talk about mitigation last night, was we are going to work with these states to fix their problems. It's something that you heard, right, to fix their machines, to fix their voter rolls. So you might see that framed as subsequently, oh, they didn't do enough, ergo, we are going to come in and step in and take an action. So it lays the groundwork for a potential action down the road, and you can kind of point back to this, point back to these data sets and say, this was a problem, they didn't take an action on it, here is what we're going to do next. He also very heavily promoted the SAVE Act. So there's that direct connection, arguing that this new material is evidence that the SAVE Act should be passed. Even though, again, you really don't see that direct connection. It's more just using this moment to achieve a political objective that he wants to anyway. All right. Molly, you...

get the last word are, well, actually, I'm going to go through each of you. Was this substantially less bad than you expected, or is it just differently bad? I don't think it is all that

different from what I expected by the time the speech came around. I am relieved about the degree to which there was just nothing new here. Otherwise, I think we're still in a wait-and-see situation.

Mike, are you at all relieved or are you just, you know, this is about deferring things until after conditioning stuff until after the election and we'll fight about it then?

The best, most apt quote I can think of is the tagline for David Kronenberg's The Fly. Be afraid. Be very afraid. What we saw last night, I fear, was the start of something really unprecedented in American history. And there's an analogy that came to mind, not for moral equivalents, but simply for political salience. I can't help but now think of January 6th as sort of an American version of the Beer Hall pooch, an attempt to change power dynamics that failed that momentarily incapacitated the people who carried it out who then vanished for a number of years to better strategize and plan and what we are seeing in america now are the fruits of that plan and i have very real worries that last night was simply the

first step. Renee, you get the last word, this time for real. So this was largely what I expected.

I expected another round of declassification theater. I think Tulsi really laid out how they do this every single time. We've seen it now, I think this is the fifth, this is the fifth time maybe, where we've seen a transfer of documents that does not match the claims. And so that was what I was expecting. I think the question is how they try to leverage it going forward and whether what public opinion looks like this morning. I was over on X reading and, you know, you see this very divided reality where people who received the pre-briefing, you know, Posobiec and these other folks were out there arguing that this is like the most revelatory thing that we've ever heard with regard to China. It's just not true, but their audiences are going to trust them when they say that. And so that question of how that trust translates to his ability to take an action down the road with some support is where I think the question currently is.

All right. We are going to leave it there. Rene, we will let you get back to, you know, censoring people. Molly, we will let you get back to, you know, misleading the public. And Mike Feinberg, a deep state actor, we will let you get back to conspiring against the democratically elected leadership of the United States. Folks, we will be back this afternoon at four o'clock for Lawfare Live, the trials and tribulations of the Trump administration. Until then, you know, stay with us.

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