PARKS: It was. I mean, he hit on a bunch of the themes that will sound really familiar to anyone who’s heard the president over the last few years – the idea that voting machines can’t be trusted, the idea that noncitizens are voting en masse in American elections, shadowy schemes by foreign governments to try to influence voting, that sort of thing. But our team at NPR started looking through all of these documents that the White House published, and it’s not really clear what is actually new here that impacts our understanding of the security of America’s elections. I talked with Adrian Fontes after the speech. He’s Arizona’s top voting official. He’s a Democrat. Here’s how he described it.

ADRIAN FONTES: I kind of felt a little bit cheated. I was expecting some kind of delicious bombshell that we might be able to investigate, but instead I got a rehash of the same grievance.

PARKS: Fontes was struck by how closely all these classified documents aligned with what was already public about the 2020 elections.