Trump to attack voting systems, undermine elections in primetime address Thursday

President Donald Trump is expected to take to the airwaves Thursday to again push false claims of widespread voting fraud during the 2020 election. Despite losing the race by over 7 million votes, he has spent the last five and a half years alleging it was stolen from him.

"It's really big news," Trump said in the Oval Office Tuesday after confirming he will speak about voting machines and elections in his address. "Our country has to shape up," he added. "What we're going to be talking about Thursday -- it doesn't get any bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don't have a country."

On Monday, the Washington Reporter, a media outlet founded by Republican consultants, citing "a well-placed source in Georgia," claimed in a social media post that Trump would allege that Georgia's two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, were "illegitimate" because of fraud.

In a follow-up post, the Washington Reporter retreated from its initial claim. Instead, it said that Trump's speech would not focus on Georgia's 2020 elections and that its "Georgia Republican source" was tipped off on Trump's speech and ODNI's report's "Georgia election focus" in advance.

In a declassified report in March 2021, the country's leading intelligence and security agencies said they found "no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results."

"The failed president, pocketing billions as he drives up prices, is afraid to lose the midterms," Ossoff wrote in a post. "So he will reheat debunked election conspiracy theories and tell bizarre new lies to deny his 2020 defeat and attack voting rights."