In the weeks after Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, the people that Trump appointed to run the Department of Justice, cybersecurity agencies and intelligence departments all said the same thing — the election was fair, legitimate and free of major fraud or foreign interference.
In his second term, Trump has tried to use the levers of power to rewrite that well-settled history, something that he's expected to try again on Thursday night with an address to the nation.
He has already appointed loyalists who have echoed his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and made clear he expects everyone to follow his lead.
In an indication of how fealty to Trump’s lies has become a litmus test for his administration, many of his nominees have steadfastly refused to directly answer the question of who won in 2020, preferring to tersely note that Biden became president. Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to become the next national intelligence director, was the latest to repeat that formula in his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
“He had the most electoral votes," Clayton said of Biden. “He was declared the winner.”
“And who has the most electoral votes? Is it the person who wins or the person who loses?” asked Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat.
“That’s your characterization," Clayton responded. "I’m not going to continue to do this.”
The president has embraced baroque conspiracy theories about an international cabal that penetrated U.S. voting machines that have led to libel suits against his allies when they’ve repeated the claims.
Ahead of his speech, Trump has teased “really big news” and said “it doesn't get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don't have a country.”
Election experts fear another round of falsehoods.
“There has been six-plus years of consistent findings from the intelligence community and from everyone who’s looked at it that there was no foreign interference in 2020, and our voting systems were secure and accurate,” said Victoria Bassetti of States United, a nonpartisan group supporting the state officials who run elections. “I suppose the president could come up with some new assertion or new conclusion. It would fly in the face of all the evidence.”
There’s been an enormous amount of reviews of the 2020 election. Trump and his allies lost dozens of court cases challenging the results, sometimes before judges the president appointed himself. Numerous audits, recounts and investigations, including several by Republicans, found no major problems with the vote or count.
Trump's own attorney general at the time, William Barr, said there were no signs of significant fraud, a statement that earned him Trump's ire. Trump's appointee to run the agency that watches for cyberattacks on American election infrastructure, Chris Krebs, declared that the 2020 election was secure and there were no signs of tampering — which led Trump to fire Krebs and demand an investigation of him upon returning to power in 2025.
An intelligence assessment released in the early days of the Biden administration but completed on Jan. 7, 2021, in Trump's last days in office, found no foreign tampering with vote totals or election equipment in 2020. And, last year, Trump signed a federal document as part of a regular review of possible foreign influence in elections that declared “there has been no evidence of a foreign power altering the outcome or vote tabulation in any United States election.”
Since returning to office, Trump has launched a review of the 2020 vote. Federal agents have seized voting records in Democratic-run Fulton County, Georgia, and Republican-run Maricopa County, Arizona — two major metropolitan swing state counties that figured prominently in 2020 conspiracy theories.
Trump tapped Kurt Olsen, a prominent lawyer in the world of election conspiracy theorists, to head the probe. Olsen was previously sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for false statements in a lawsuit he brought to challenge the 2022 loss of an Arizona governor's race by one of Trump's allies.
"He has committed untold taxpayer resources,” said David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Integrity & Research. “They’ve found nothing.”
A search warrant affidavit filed in the Fulton County case was full of old, debunked conspiracy theories about the vote in the county. The FBI reassigned hundreds of analysts to go through the material.
Still, election conspiracy theorists have been buzzing — as they have ever since Election Day in 2020 — that Trump is about to reveal irrefutable evidence of massive election fraud.
One version alleges that Venezuela and possibly other countries manipulated U.S. voting machines to deprive Trump of a victory. Venezuela's former president, Nicolas Maduro, is currently awaiting trial in Manhattan on federal charges of drug trafficking after the U.S. military took him from that country's capital.
Those theories have led to massive payouts in libel lawsuits brought by voting machine companies and others. Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle one lawsuit over it airing those claims and others on the air in late 2020. Conservative networks Newsmax andOne America News have also reached settlements with voting companies over airing those allegations.
A Denver jury found that Mike Lindell, a prominent election conspiracy theorist who Trump this week endorsed as a Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, defamed an employee with a voting machine company by calling him a traitor.
Becker noted there has been a clear pattern over the six years of election conspiracy theories surrounding Trump's loss. Conspiracy theorists, including Trump himself, make sweeping allegations in public, sometimes with what seems to be massive reams of documentation from elaborate election databases. But they've lost regularly in court, where the threshold is whether there's any factual basis to the claims.
He suggested that anything new from Trump on elections be subjected to that same scrutiny.
"If someone’s alleging a crime that occurred six years ago, we shouldn’t be responding to their claims,” Becker said. “We should be demanding they meet the burden of proof.”
President Donald Trump speaks at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., during the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, Wednesday, July 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
President Donald Trump speaks at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., during the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, Wednesday, July 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — U.S. Coast Guard crews suspended their search late Wednesday for three people missing a day after a boat capsized in the cold, choppy waters of San Francisco Bay while carrying 20 family members and friends who went out to scatter the ashes of a loved one.
“Suspending a search is one of the hardest parts of our job and our condolences are with the families of all involved,” U.S. Coast Guard Captain Jared S. Toczko said in a statement.
Ralph Boisa said his extended family and a few close friends were on his younger brother's boat Tuesday afternoon to celebrate the life of his daughter who died over a decade ago and was in her 30s.
His older brother, Clifford, died shortly after being pulled out of the water. Sixteen others were rescued as the cabin cruiser was hit by a wave, took on water, listed heavily to one side and rolled over before sinking. Clifford's dog also died.
The three people missing are his sister Carol, Clifford's wife Jackie, and his daughter's friend, he said.
“We’ve gone through a lot of tragedy over the years,” said Boisa, who lost his other daughter in 1995. He lives in Washington and couldn't make it for the excursion.
Crews searched more than 814 square miles (2,108.3 square kilometers), according to the Coast Guard, and suspended their search “pending further developments.”
Toczko previously said he would not dismiss the possibility that those missing could still be alive, though he also said some could have been trapped inside the three-deck, 49-foot (15-meter) cabin cruiser.
“We do know individuals were in the main deck and potentially below deck," he said. Witnesses described seeing people pounding on glass windows, trapped as the boat sank.
Crews have identified the location the boat sank but have yet to determine how deep it sank, Toczko said.
Once the boat is located, officials will send either divers or an underwater drone to determine if it's feasible to salvage it, said San Francisco Police Commander Brien Hoo. If the boat is under 120 feet (37 meters) of water, it would be difficult for divers to get to it, he said.
Witnesses reported “rough seas,” San Francisco Fire Department Chief Dean Crispen said, and rescuers said swells reached up to 5 feet (1.5 meters). Marine weather conditions, however, didn't warrant a small craft advisory from the National Weather Service.
Fire department spokesperson Lt. Mariano Elias said the vessel, named Volare, was registered out of Stockton, California, which sits at the eastern edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
According to the ship-tracking website VesselFinder, the boat departed a San Francisco marina, passed under the Golden Gate Bridge twice and visited Angel Island State Park, the largest natural island in the bay. It was on its way back to San Francisco when it sank near Alcatraz, the famous maximum-security federal prison which closed more than 60 years ago.
Kirk Miller, an experienced local sailor with a master mariner license, said an uneven distribution of passengers could have caused the Volare to tip.
“As it rocks in the waves, it leans over a little bit,” Miller said. “And as it leans over, the stability would decrease. If you had weight down below it acts as ballast. There was nothing in the conditions that were extreme in any regard. There was no massive gust of wind, no huge wave.”
Two men who jumped into action while fishing for halibut said the boat that sank was more than capable of being out in the bay. Justin Marceline and Michael Montoya said they saw what they thought was smoke and arrived to find the vessel halfway submerged.
“We just started yanking people out,” Marceline told The Associated Press. At least two people bobbed in the water without life jackets, while others clung to a windsurfer’s board.
Marceline could see people trapped inside the rapidly sinking boat through its windows. He threw lead fishing weights to survivors in the water, hoping they could smash the glass, but they were too weak.
“It was like Titanic in real life,” he said. “There was stuff everywhere. People were banging on the glass.”
Montoya estimated they pulled eight or nine people aboard, including the captain, before first responders arrived.
Initial callers reported what appeared to be smoke coming from the boat, but San Francisco police officers who first reached the vessel said it was steam.
Toczko said there were life jackets onboard the boat and that some people were rescued wearing them.
Sudden immersion in water under 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius) can lead to cold water shock, a condition where people lose dexterity in minutes. That can be dangerous or deadly when trying to escape a sinking watercraft.
The owners of the boat are John Boisa and Miriam Boisa of Stockton, Coast Guard records show. They did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
“All of us are grieving during this time,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Ralph Boisa said his brother John is a “very capable and experienced boatsman” who served in the U.S. Navy. He frequently took family members out on the boat to the San Francisco Bay, Boisa said.
His older brother who died, Clifford Boisa, lived on a small prune orchard in Sutter County in the Sacramento Valley and was a volunteer sheriff's deputy for more than a decade. Ralph Boisa had planned to visit him for his 80th birthday party next month.
“He was a happy guy, jovial,” Boisa said. “We're pretty broken up here.”
Associated Press writers Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; Ed White in Detroit; Hallie Golden in Seattle; and photographer Noah Berger in San Francisco contributed to this story.
First responders stand near a body after a boat accident near Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, Tuesday, July 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
A police boat passes Alcatraz Island as search and rescue operations continue for victims of a Tuesday boat sinking on Wednesday, July 15, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
People cover themselves with American Red Cross blankets at Fort Mason, where the Red Cross has set up an assistance center for people impacted by a boat incident in the waters off San Francisco Tuesday, July 14, 2026. (Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
A body is covered with a tarp on a dock near the site of boat accident on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
A U.S. Coast Guard crew goes past Alcatraz Island near the site of a pontoon boat accident on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
A San Francisco Fire Department vessel passes the city skyline while searching for missing victims after a boat accident near Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, Tuesday, July 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
A body is covered with a tarp on a dock near the site of boat accident on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
A helicopter flies past the Golden Gate Bridge while searching for missing victims after a boat accident near Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, Tuesday, July 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
