Trump, FBI's Patel Wacky Stolen 2020 Election Conspiracy Theory

Jun 21, 2025 09:31 PM EDT, Sat

Trump, FBI’s Patel run with a weird new 2020 election conspiracy theory

The president isn’t the only one pursuing baseless ideas about his 2020 defeat: His FBI director is unfortunately doing the same thing.

June 19, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT By Steve Benen

At a White House event ostensibly about a new flag pole, Donald Trump fielded a question about his “Gold Card” gambit, which led the president to deliver an uncomfortably long and rambling answer about a great many subjects — including China and license plates.

It was admittedly a little tough to follow, but the Republican was apparently referring to a new conspiracy theory about his defeat in the 2020 election, which he continues to pretend that he “won … by a lot.”

The odd comments came one day after his handpicked FBI director, Kash Patel, published a related item to his social media account, claiming, “The FBI has located documents which detail alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the CCP. I have immediately declassified the material and turned the documents over to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley for further review.”

As part of the same tweet thread, Patel referred the public to an article from John Solomon, another Trump ally, who reported on an unsubstantiated claim from an unidentified source about China producing driver’s licenses to be used in a mail-in ballot scheme.

Those inclined to take any of this seriously should probably think twice. NBC News reported:

The article Patel promoted mentioned that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has seized fake licenses that were arriving mostly from China and Hong Kong around the time the FBI received the tip about the election plot. According to a 2020 news release from CBP, most of the seized licenses ‘were for college-age students,’ a population that has historically sought licenses with fake birthdays so underage students can get into bars and purchase alcohol.

The NBC News report added, for those who might’ve forgotten, that there’s still “no evidence of widespread or systemic voter fraud affecting the 2020 election,” partisan hysterics notwithstanding.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert, also told NBC News that while Patel’s post “might feed the MAGA base,” what he was promoting was an uncorroborated story of unknown origin “with no evidence that anything actually happened, and certainly no evidence that any ballots were cast or illegal voters were even registered to vote using state identifications.” What’s more, Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and an MSNBC legal analyst, noted via Bluesky that the Justice Department “doesn’t turn over evidence to Congress if they have a viable investigation in the works.”

Or put another way, conspiracy theorists on the right who hoped that this might finally confirm their baseless ideas should probably start lowering their expectations now.

That said, this week’s unfortunate developments were a timely reminder that Trump isn’t the only one still embracing nonsensical ideas about his 2020 defeat nearly five years later: The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who presumably has actual work to do, is swimming in the same misguided waters.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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