Adam Schiff: Trump is merely trying to undermine confidence in our elections, so he can seize voter data under the guise of protecting it

Tonight, the same President who once badgered Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to find 11,780 votes that didn’t exist, so he could overtake Biden’s lead in the state in 2020, put out a whole new set of lies about our elections, past and present.
Trump knows he has failed to deliver on any of his campaign promises, has raised costs of American families instead of lowering them, and gotten us into another Middle Eastern war nobody wanted. Terrified that voters will send his party packing in the midterms, he is falling back on some old lies and putting out new ones.
All of his claims and the selective release of any documents must be treated with the greatest skepticism given the President’s many lies and misrepresentations about our elections. Even so, tonight he produced no evidence that China or any other country manipulated a single U.S. voting system or changed a single vote. He is merely trying to undermine confidence in our elections, so he can seize voter data under the guise of protecting it, and subvert elections he is convinced his party is losing. He will not succeed.
The reality is that foreign governments do try to influence our elections—in fact, Trump has previously encouraged Russia to do exactly that. He has also repeatedly ignored and dismissed previous, credible intelligence about foreign interference in elections because it did not fit his political agenda. But when it comes to identifying real threats and giving our election administrators the resources to fight them, Trump’s actions speak louder than his words tonight.
Under Trump’s leadership, he has gutted resources committed to combatting foreign malign influence. Funding for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and local election security grants have been slashed under the Trump administration. Seasoned FBI and other federal agents have been pulled off the beat to chase conspiracies and aid Trump’s chaotic and unlawful deportation agenda. And Trump himself has discounted these threats as hoaxes in the past, breaking from bipartisan tradition of taking the hard work of our intelligence community seriously.
What the President presented tonight was not a leveling with the American people. It was a renewed attempt to inject fear and cloud reality ahead of the next election in November and provide pretext for seizing voter data, and discrediting and interfering with election results. By now it should be obvious that Trump intends to repeat his playbook from 2020, and attempt to deny any result he does not like. And tonight was just another attempt by him to avoid accountability and defeat in November.