Peter Navarro Claims Trump’s Speech Last Night Wasn’t About If 2020 Election Was Stolen

Donald Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, threw his enthusiastic support behind the president’s primetime speech and release of unclassified documents claiming the U.S. election system is vulnerable to rigging.

Navarro claimed that Trump’s Thursday night address was not about rehashing claims that the 2020 elections were stolen, despite Trump mentioning 2020 several times throughout the speech.

“What I want to start with is facts,” Navarro told reporters outside the White House on Friday. “There’s a simple fact that the American people have lost a lot of confidence in our election system, and there is a deep, deep, deep division on whether the 2020 election was stolen. That’s not what last night was about,” Navarro said, continuing:

What last night was about is protecting future elections, but the fact that there’s such dissonance between some people who view that 2020 election is not stolen, some people do. And the question, I think the way to frame the way to think about this is, based on what was released — and I’m going to go through that — based on what was released, is the probability that that election was stolen higher today in people’s minds than it was before we got the data. And I would argue that certainly, there’s no question whether you have a very low view of whether it was stolen, it’s got to creep up a little bit because of what came out. If you have a high view, it’s going to maybe pop to certainty and everything in between.

During his address, Trump claimed, “China was working to influence…the results of the 2020 presidential election itself,” adding, “U.S. spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020, when they discovered that tens of millions of voter data…in 18 states have been bought, stolen or hacked by China. Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden.”

The New York Times reported, “While the documents outline some nascent interest by Chinese officials in influence operations, they concede Beijing never endorsed any broad-based effort to undercut Mr. Trump.”

In addition, “John Solomon, who is leading Mr. Trump’s task force on declassifying documents on a range of issues, told reporters outside the White House that the intelligence community documents show no evidence that votes in election machines were changed in the past three elections,” the report said.

Trump also used his speech to threaten prosecution of anyone believed to be involved in rigging U.S. elections.

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