How Trump Is Turning the U.S. Intel Community Into an Election-Rigging Machine
In part 4 of Zeteo’s ‘Start the Steal’ series, we detail how Trump is weaponizing America’s top spies and intelligence agencies to strangle American democracy.
Note from our Editor-in-Chief:
This week, we’ve been publishing our ‘Start The Steal’ series, documenting the president’s scorched-earth campaign to rig the coming elections. This remains the biggest story in America right now, and to keep reporting this story the way it needs to be told, we need your support. In this new age of American authoritarianism, independent media is more important than ever. Subscribe to Zeteo and never hit another paywall. Read on for Part Four of our special series, below. – Mehdi
Corrupting Intel Agencies:
High on the list of Trump’s unprecedented moves is his ongoing push to subsume the U.S. intelligence community into his personality cult – and use it to directly aid his campaign to corrupt and rig elections domestically.
“We are so beyond the worst-case scenario of what many of us predicted Trump would do,” said Ian Bassin, who worked as a lawyer in the Obama White House. “This is the playbook of dictators: to turn these agencies into personal tools to aggrandize power and rig elections.”
Zeteo has also learned that Trump-backing election officials in Georgia have been in touch with a Trump administration election security official, adding to an alarming pattern of this administration working closely with the election-denial movement, down to the local level.
As Donald Trump’s aides sat down to write his “address to the nation” that he would deliver on July 16, they realized that they had a problem: They couldn’t actually write what their boss wanted them to write.
For months, the president of the United States had been itching to unveil a big, primetime speech that would detail newly declassified documents and U.S. intelligence proving his demonstrably false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him in part by a massive conspiracy of foreign adversaries; that evidence of this conspiracy had been suppressed by the anti-Trump American “Deep State”; and that this secret trove of papers meant that everyone in the country has to submit to his party’s widespread crackdown on elections.
Obviously, none of that was ever true. And the White House knew it.
Since January 2025, the second Trump administration and his party’s elite ranks have worked to pervert and repurpose swaths of the U.S. intelligence apparatus – the institutions that are supposed to monitor foreign adversaries and protect Americans – to directly aid the president’s authoritarian desires to cement his 2020 lies into policy and remake domestic elections under the banner of the right’s heads-I-win-tails-you-lose philosophy.
The speech – and the intelligence cherry-picking that went into it – was just one part of a giant narrative-cooking operation meant to justify Trump’s attempted federal takeover of elections.
According to two U.S. officials and two people with knowledge of the matter, Trump and senior White House staff had been briefed multiple times this year, by intelligence personnel and others, that there was no classified or top-secret evidence hidden within the federal government to suggest that China, or any other, government had breached election infrastructure to flip votes in the 2020 presidential contest to Democratic nominee Joe Biden. When Trump would seem annoyed by this, two of the sources said, some aides would assure him that officials had not finished reviewing literally every document yet, pushing the Trump-appeasing excuses into the realm of you-can’t-prove-a-negative.
“There just wasn’t anything to it,” a senior U.S. official told Zeteo.