'We won all the damn elections' Thomas Massie slams Trump’s claims of voter fraud

In a nearly a half-hour-long speech on Thursday, President Donald Trump cast unprecedented doubt on the integrity of the U.S. electoral process, claiming it was “catastrophically” short of standards and vulnerable to tampering by foreign powers. Since the allegations were highly anticipated, Congressmen Thomas Massie had predictively dismissed the claims, saying Republicans can’t keep blaming election fraud "when they control Washington."

In his speech, Trump laid out a list of claims, including allegations of China interfering with the 2020 election in a primetime televised address. He announced that the administration was releasing four documents that were previously classified, to show the vulnerabilities in the electoral process, China's meddling, non-citizens in the voter rolls, and more, as he pushed for his voter ID bill, the SAVE Act. 

Prior to his speech, in an interview on MS Now's "Morning Joe" Massie generally dismissed the claims saying, “We won all the damn elections. We control the House. We control the Senate. We control the White House. To some degree, we control the Supreme Court. Why are you complaining about election fraud?” He went on to add that "the actual fraud is that we’re [Republicans] not holding ourselves to the promises that we made," claiming that his Party was "wasting the opportunity" given to them. 

Trump's Thursday night speech began with him boasting about his policies, the economy and how the U.S. was winning the Iran war. Then came a stark warning about what he described as flaws in the voting system as he announced the release of documents related to the 2020 and 2018 elections, when he lost the presidential election and when his party suffered major losses. “No country can be great without fair and honest elections,” Trump said, adding, “If there can be no trust, there can be no greatness. Unfortunately, the system we have falls catastrophically short of that standard.”

He claimed that the previously classified U.S. Intelligence Community Assessments and other reports show that the government had long known that the voting machines are extremely exposed to attack from adversaries including "Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups". He further alleged that during the 2020 election cycle, China obtained 220 million voter files, in what he claimed was the "largest compromise of election data in history". 

He further alleged that the previous administrations covered up voter fraud, and an FBI investigation in Detroit that found canvassers signing and submitting voter registration forms in other people’s names, in exchange for gift cards was silenced. "The Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation for years and then killed it", Trump alleged, adding that he had ordered FBI Director Kash Patel to ensure that the matter is fully investigated. 

However, the allegations have already been fact-checked by PolitiFact, as it cited a report from news outlet Bridge Michigan that said Muskegon’s city clerk office did receive about 6,000 applications from a single registration organization based in Tennessee; most of them were valid, but “several hundred” had “irregularities." The office alerted the authorities, and the FBI ultimately investigated but did not pursue any charges.  “Fraud was determined to have occurred at the lowest levels of the company,” the state attorney general’s office told Bridge Michigan.

Lastly, Trump claimed that according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) review of state voter rolls and public records, about 278,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in federal elections. He added that since Democrat states refuse to share their voter files, the number could be much higher. The president used the finding to push for the long-stalled SAVE Act, claiming it was necessary to ensure only citizens voted in elections. However, as per the released document, the DHS reviewed illegal registrations to vote in just the four states of California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada, and did not provide details on how the figure was calculated. The department further suggested that dead people listed on voter rolls are a much more common occurrence than noncitizens on voter rolls, as the 10 states that used a federal system to remove invalid voters from the rolls found 360,000 dead voters and less than 11,000 noncitizens.