Opinion|How Trump Abused the Power to Declassify America’s Secrets

To the casual viewer, President Trump’s Thursday speech about election security might have seemed like yet another rehash of his obsessive conspiracy theorizing about the 2020 election. It was that, but it was also a dangerous misuse of his power to declassify the nation’s secrets. Mr. Trump weaponized America’s intelligence community — a big, expensive complex of professionals tasked with keeping Americans safe — against the country’s democratic system, endangering both.

“I served at C.I.A. for 20 years, briefed this president in his first term, and oversaw intelligence programs at the White House at the start of his second,” says a former C.I.A. analyst, Julia Curlee, who is now a fellow at the national security publication Lawfare. “I have never seen raw, unverified reporting pushed out like this — cherry-picked to arm an assault on U.S. elections and turn the most powerful intelligence apparatus on earth against the American people.”

Mr. Trump said that his goal was to rebuild trust in elections. His claims about the hundreds of pages of documents he released on Thursday — sometimes exaggerated, sometimes false — can only undermine faith in elections generally and in the upcoming midterms in particular. The president got his allies inside the government to release intelligence selectively, then mixed facts from these reports with unsupported claims. He exaggerated the significance of Chinese intelligence activity during his first term. He falsely suggested that American voting machines might have been hacked by foreign adversaries.

Election experts across the country, including state-level Republicans whom Mr. Trump has pressured to support his claims, assert that voting is secure, free and fair. Nearly every part of the country uses voting machines that produce paper records, which can be audited after the vote to ensure accuracy. For all the vulnerabilities Mr. Trump cited, the intelligence community asserts that there is no evidence that foreign governments interfere with physical voting or counting. “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” a group of top intelligence experts wrote in 2020.

But Mr. Trump doesn’t use the intelligence community for its designated purpose — to be a source of information that is contextualized and interpreted by professionals who know what raw intelligence material means. He increasingly uses it as another tool in his relentless campaign to spread misinformation.

To those who want to see the intelligence community’s work put to its best use, Mr. Trump’s misuse of its product is doubly frustrating because, in general, the nation’s leaders should be more willing to release government secrets. In the run-up to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration declassified material in an attempt to deter Vladimir Putin’s attack and to “pre-bunk” his false claim that Ukraine was plotting to attack pro-Russia civilians. Mr. Putin still invaded, but his pretext was obliterated and the global reaction was severe. This tactic worked so well that the U.S. government began using it to fight autocrats all over the globe, regularly declassifying information that undercut their lies. This had the added benefit of building confidence in America’s intelligence agencies.