Donald Trump has spent more than a decade spreading false and inflated claims about election outcomes and how the nation’s elections are run. His primetime address on Thursday was no exception.

The president alleged “shocking vulnerabilities in election infrastructure” and claimed our “election system” is “dangerously” exposed to “hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.”

But it appears much of the newly declassified material he announced Thursday evening echoes or reinterprets previously disclosed information that was already known to intelligence officials, including during his first administration.

Importantly, nothing in the materials supports any allegations that any votes were manipulated by fraud or foreign actors to have changed election outcomes.

Election officials and voting rights advocates fear the president’s remarks, which he says are meant to protect elections, will instead continue to sow deep distrust in their legitimacy to serve his own interests.

Alex Woodward takes a closer look.

The conservative network did air the president’s speech last night and wisely chose to tread carefully in its treatment of his remarks, given the trouble it encountered in the aftermath of the 2020 vote.

The president attacked ABC and NBC last night for declining to broadcast his address, saying in the course of it: “They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason.

“Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licences.”

These remarks from John Solomon, a conservative journalist who has been chosen to lead Trump’s task force on declassifying documents, are not exactly a ringing endorsement of the claims the president made last night.

Given that Trump is a man who prizes unquestioning loyalty above all things, he is likely to be displeased.

Trump has a long history of making false claims about elections and files released by his own White House suggest he may once again be exaggerating.

One document, for instance, notes that “Beijing did not intend to try to affect the election,” directly contradicting Trump’s claims last night that China sought to steal the vote and tank his candidacy.

Here’s just a taste of the opposition indignation about the president’s address last night, with the California governor setting the tone.

Responding to the president’s primetime attack last night, China’s Foreign Ministry has just said the allegations have no factual basis.

It adds that Beijing adheres to the principle of non-intervention in other state’s affairs and has no interest in influencing U.S. elections.

Earlier, the Chinese Embassy in Washington told Reuters that China “has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections.”

President Trump’s elections speech, which alleged widespread vulnerabilities in the U.S. voting system, could be just the beginning, according to one Democratic senator.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin fears the president’s repeated claims that elections are unsafe could be a prelude to sending the military to the polls, which could intimidate voters or local officials.

“The president refuses to rule out, as does his cabinet, sending in uniformed military,” Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, told MS Now of the possibility, which has inspired her to propose legislation barring such a step.

“What if they don’t have a warrant?” she added. “These are some really scary kind of tabletop exercises [and] things that we’re having here because the president has made clear this is not a joke to him…He’s willing to really do anything to ‘win’ in November.”

A conservative journalist just inadvertently punctured a hole in President Trump’s claims that documents show a sprawling Chinese conspiracy to steal American elections.

“All I can acknowledge is what the intelligence shows,” Just the News founder John Solomon, who is part of a White House elections task force on the subject, told MS Now on Thursday. “I only know the intelligence community has zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ‘22, and ‘24.”

“I’m still researching,” he added.