In a sharp rebuke following President Trump's primetime address Thursday, veteran Republican election attorney Ben Ginsberg said the president's revived claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election remain unsupported by evidence. “What stood out to me is there is still no evidence of the result of any election being incorrect,” Ginsberg told CNN's Kaitlan Collins.
The White House had promoted the speech as “breaking news” on election security, releasing a trove of documents it said backed up Trump's long-standing allegations of a “rigged” contest. However, Ginsberg, a retired partner at Patton Boggs and Jones Day who served as national counsel to multiple Republican presidential campaigns, noted the administration failed to produce the documents or evidence that would substantiate such serious charges. “There still were not the documents, there still was not the evidence, although we’ll see what’s produced,” he added.
Independent experts who reviewed the White House files found no new revelatory claims to support fraud allegations, according to multiple reports. The Associated Press concluded the speech “did not produce evidence that votes had been manipulated or that the election outcome had been altered.” This echoes the assessment of Senator Chris Coons, who said Trump's election fraud speech lacked any concrete proof.
Ginsberg acknowledged that the U.S. election system is “not a perfect system,” but he urged the Trump administration to show “bit of leadership” in addressing vulnerabilities. “Elections are notoriously underfunded,” he told CNN. “And so, if you want to fix the vulnerabilities, there should be a lot of federal money going out to states and localities to actually succeed in doing that.”
Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who served under Trump, echoed that critique, saying the president offered no roadmap for reform. “When you tell someone that there’s a major problem, we need to have a solution, we need to have a path forward,” Spicer said on NewsNation Friday. “I don’t know that he gave a lot of people that.” The lack of a concrete plan has drawn criticism from both sides of the aisle, with Representative Jim Himes accusing Trump of a “bald-faced lie” in his election security address.
The president's speech also revived allegations of Chinese interference, which Senator Mark Warner dismissed as “completely false”. Meanwhile, Beijing rejected the claims as “fabricated.” The administration's push for the Save America Act, which would tighten voting rules, has so far failed to gain traction amid the lack of evidence for widespread fraud.
