WSJ What’s News - Fact-Checking Trump’s Election Fraud Claims

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

A.M. Edition for July 17. President Trump is ramping up his efforts to sow doubt about election results, raising familiar but unproven claims about the voting process. WSJ’s Washington coverage chief Damian Paletta breaks down Trump’s latest speech on election integrity, and fact-checks key talking points. Plus, the SEC is flooded with complaints over its plan to scrap required quarterly earnings. And WSJ’s Callum Borchers explains how companies are quietly using new AI tools to track employee digital footprints. Daniel Bach hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Trump uses a primetime address to claim the U.S. election system has been compromised. Plus, thousands of people complain about the SEC no longer requiring companies to post- quarterly updates. And AI knows what you posted online, and so does your future employer. You might think explicit images are private, but facial recognition software could enable an employer to identify you. Sure, you place that bet under a pseudonym, but is your screen name similar to? to one you've used in the past? It's Friday, July 17th. I'm Daniel Bach for the Wall Street Journal, filling in for Luke Vargas. And here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines, and business stories moving your world today. President Trump has used a national address to so doubts

about the 2020 election result. Speaking from the East Room, he raised allegations of foreign influence in President Biden's win, while heaping more pressure on lawmakers to pass his voter ID ahead of the midterms where Republicans are at risk of losing their majorities in Congress. The journal's Washington coverage chief, Damian Poletta, was watching the speech for us. President Trump alleged a wide-ranging campaign by China in 2020 to interfere and impact the outcome of that presidential election. The People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history. in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.

Now, we have known for years that China has tried to obtain voter roles, and President Trump said that this operation was wide-ranging, and he also alleged that the U.S. intelligence community knew, or at least some people in the U.S. intelligence community, knew about this scale and that he claimed this information was withheld from him by people that he said were in the deep state. Members of the deep state, very, very famous group of people, many cases.

In our intelligence agency, worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China's sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible. Now, he did not provide any evidence

that suggests that they did impact the outcome of the election or that they did anything to manipulate votes or that they actually cast votes. But he wanted the American people to know that he believed that there was new information that he has declassified that shows that the U.S. government, or at least some within the U.S. government, believed that China's motives here were very nefarious and that they were trying to tilt the scales, or they wanted to tilt the scales, to help Joe Biden win the election over President Trump. In response to Trump's speech, a spokesman at the Chinese embassy said China has, has never and will never interfere in U.S. presidential elections. A U.S. intelligence assessment

from 2021 determined with high confidence that Beijing did consider an influence campaign but did not deploy it, opting instead to prioritize stability in its relationship with Washington. Here's Damien again. There have been many reviews done by Republican states and Democratic states that have disputed his allegation that the 2020 election was stolen. And by putting these documents out there. Some of them are partially redacted, but he believes that putting these out there, it could so doubt in the American public's view about the safety and security of American elections. And that brings us to where he wants to go next. Tomorrow, the Secretary of Homeland Security will hold a briefing to outline his department's

recent work confirming cyber vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems. They are bad. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Mark Wayne Mullen, is pretty new to the job. And this will be a big moment for him to either make Americans feel safer, that the election system is airtight, or perhaps he's going to show that there are some vulnerabilities and weaknesses that states need to address. The 25-minute speech was full of allegations, including the unsubstantiated claim that Venezuela tampered with voting machines. The president also insinuated states were trying to prevent him from getting access to voter data and that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens had been able to vote. That's a claim that state and federal judges have repeatedly. dismissed, calling such legal cases speculative and lacking evidence. Here again is Damien. Now that a real test is going to be whether there's going to be prosecutions to back up these

allegations or whether his information is based on perhaps flimsier evidence that is harder to hold up to a grand jury and even to a judge. President Trump promised a big speech. It was certainly extraordinary for him in the White House as the president with the midterm elections just three months away to cast so much doubt on the, integrity of the U.S. election system. He called for the passage of a new federal law that would dramatically change the way elections are held around the country. And so this is something that Republicans have been wrestling with the Capitol Hill for months, and that pressure is only going to intensify. Senators have been hesitant to pass the Save America Act, which would restrict mail-in ballots

and require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Trump has said he won't sign any other legislation until the bill is passed. We're exclusively reporting that the Treasury Department's top tax official has been forced out of his job. That's after he warned that the White House was at risk of violating a federal law, which barred senior officials from being involved in IRS audits. Kenneth Keyes will leave his roles as assistant Treasury Secretary and acting chief counsel of the IRS in coming weeks. People familiar with the matter said Keyes at times clash behind the scenes with White House officials. It couldn't be determined what White House requests he objected to

and whether the administration plans to follow through with them after Keys departs. The heavy smoke enveloping large parts of the Midwest and northeast from wildfires burning in northern Minnesota and northern Ontario is still affecting air quality across a number of states this morning. Health officials continue to urge people to stay inside or wear masks outside in places where air quality has reached unhealthy and hazardous levels. I'm a public health nurse and I follow the air quality and heat announcements, and I'm only out because I have to run a quick errand,

otherwise I'd be inside. New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani said yesterday was expected to be the worst day for smoke in the city, but that the state had forecast air quality in the unhealthy range. And I want to be clear about what that word means in this instance. At unhealthy levels, everyone, not just people with asthma and heart conditions, not just older adults, everyone may feel health effect. Forecasts suggest the smoke might ease in New York today, while areas around Lake Michigan are expected to see continued haze throughout the weekend with Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Chicago area hardest hit. Now to Texas.

So far, there have been two reported deaths because of the flooding. Governor Greg Abbott gave an update last night on catastrophic flooding that has swept through the Texas Hill country, saying the hardest hit areas are expecting more rain. and are not out of danger yet. The National Weather Service said about two feet of rain fell in some places, including in Yuvaldi. It comes almost exactly a year after the region was ravaged by floodwaters over the 4th of July weekend, where more than 100 people were killed, including 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic. Human life remains the focus right now. The weather pattern is going to start moving out in the latter part of tomorrow and over the weekend. It will remain in far west Texas a little bit throughout the weekend. But for the most part, we will

begin to focus on recovery, rebuilding, and things like that. Abbott said so far rescuers on boats and helicopters have saved more than 200 people. And federal health authorities say shredded iceberg lettuce supplied to Taco Bell is linked to a parasitic outbreak that has made thousands of people sick in five states. The Food and Drug Administration said it had identified a single supplier of iceberg lettuce from Mexico used by Taco Bell locations where people became ill with cyclospiriasis in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. The FDA didn't publicly mention a supplier by name, but a person familiar with the investigation said Taylor Farms was linked to the outbreak. Taylor Farms didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The FDA said Taco Bell

had committed to stop using any lettuce from the supplier and to determine if any of the potentially contaminated produce remains on the market. Coming up, the day's market news and how your potential employer is using AI to look for breadcrumbs about your online activity. That story and more after the break. Yesterday's tech sell-off in the U.S. has spilled over into Asia and Europe this morning with shares of European semiconductor companies sharply lower. Bouts of volatility have plagued chip stocks in recent weeks, as some investors worry that valuations of AI spending might be too high. Meanwhile, oil prices are on track for a weekly gain of more than 10% as the U.S. and Iran step up attacks, raising fears of broader regional disruptions. The Securities and Exchange

Commission has asked the public for input on its proposal to no longer require public companies to report quarterly financial results. Markets reporter Caitlin McCabe says there was a huge response that was overwhelmingly negative. So the SEC received more than 200,000 comments, which was actually the most feedback the agency has ever received on a proposal. And there were really a wide-ranging group of people that wrote in, people who are public school teachers, a childhood cancer nonprofit, companies themselves. And I think the scale of this and the variety of the responses received really just illustrates the extent to which really everyday Americans and everyone is tapped into markets right now.

We've had this huge retail trading boom. And some of the big themes that people were touching on were things like this proposal prevents them from accessing information about companies. You know, they also had comments about this would let companies hide behind closed doors or let fraud fester. Publicly listed European companies haven't been required to report quarterly financial results since 2013, while the UK ended quarterly reporting requirements about a decade ago. But many companies still update investors on the off quarters with sales or revenue figures. Chinese president Xi Jinping is pitching Beijing as the champion of a new global AI order. Speaking at an AI conference in Shanghai, she promoted China's open source AI models as, quote, a global public good. He also pushed back against U.S.-led tech restrictions in the name of national security,

implicitly criticizing U.S. moves to protect its lead in AI semiconductors and models. It comes as Chinese startups are rapidly leveraging open-weight models to close the gap with American giants like OpenA.I. and anthropic. And finally, employers have long been doing some digging online to vet potential workers. And with AI, they can now do it faster and cheaper. It would be slow and expensive to pay somebody to go through an applicant's old tweets and their Reddit posts, and their long-forgotten MySpace page, and so on. But now for about $30 an AI screening tool like Ferretley can cross-reference information on

dozens of platforms and do it very quickly. That's the journal's Callum Bortchers who writes our on the clock column. He says AI hasn't necessarily made our internet histories any more permanent than they were before. AI just makes it easier to dredge up stuff you didn't know could be found at all. There are more places to leave compromising breadcrumbs on the internet with the rise of adult content platforms like OnlyFans and Prediction Markets like Calci and Polymarket. You might think explicit images are private, but facial recognition software could enable an employer to identify you. Sure, you place that bet under a pseudonym, but is your screen name similar to one you've used in the past? Privacy specialists say it's possible to be anonymous online if you're

really careful, but it's a lot easier to slip up. In general, Farreately reports to employers when it is at least 70% confident about who is responsible for online content. The good news is you can use AI defensively too. You can prompt Gemini or Chad ChipT to dig into your own digital past and see what comes up. Then at least you'll have an idea of which privacy settings you should change and what old photos you might want to take down. Callum says trying to scrub everything can backfire, though, as you don't want to look like someone who has something to hide or come across as too boring. And now, maybe you have something to do this weekend. And that's it for what's news for this Friday morning. Additional sound in this episode was from

Reuters. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer. Our supervising producer is Sondra Kilhoff. And I'm Daniel Bach for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back to Tonight with a new show. Until then, have a nice weekend, and thanks for listening.