Instead, Trump issued a range of vague directives on election oversight to the FBI, the director of national intelligence and other agencies headed by controversial loyalists, calling on them to investigate “how and why such crucial information was hidden” from him and prosecute the people responsible for the alleged cover up.

Trump’s speech was in many ways an indictment of his own intelligence community, which he accused of shielding Chinese influence efforts from him throughout his first term . But the documents released Thursday night also reflect a genuine split among intelligence analysts who debated and ultimately concluded that China opted against a large-scale influence effort during the 2020 election cycle.

And in other ways the speech was the president’s latest pitch to pass the SAVE America Act, a wholesale overhaul of American election and voter registration systems rooted in his long-held grievances about the results of the 2020 election.

“Congress must pass the SAVE America Act – how easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat,” the president said. “The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune maintains there are not the votes to pass the legislation while some of Trump’s MAGA allies in the Senate have pushed to deliver it for the president by ending the filibuster.

Much of what Trump outlined regarding election security – from the vulnerability of voting machines to foreign powers targeting voter registration databases – has long been openly discussed by intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts.

The president didn’t reiterate his long held claims that the 2020 election, which President Joe Biden won, was stolen. While those claims have been widely debunked, his DOJ in recent months subpoenaed 2020 election records in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan.