Trump Ties Strikes on Iran to Debunked 2020 Election Rigging Conspiracy
In a 2:30 a.m. Eastern Time post Saturday on his Truth Social platform, President Donald Trump shared a video announcing the United States had joined Israel in launching military strikes against Iran.
Just two hours after that initial announcement, Trump shared a follow-up post that appeared to tie the strikes, at least partially, to an unsubstantiated fringe claim that Iran aided efforts to rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election against him. “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” he wrote on the platform.
That post linked to a piece from Just the News, a pro-Trump publication rife with conspiracy content that offered no concrete evidence to back its claim, only a vague assertion that Iran ran “a sophisticated election influence effort” in 2020.
The White House has not responded to requests for comment on two key questions: whether claims of Iranian election interference played any role in the decision to strike Iran, and what specific actions the so-called interference is supposed to include.
In the years following his 2020 election loss, Trump has repeatedly pushed a slew of baseless conspiracy theories claiming the contest was stolen from him. Since returning to the White House last year, he has allowed his administration to center these already-debunked falsehoods in official policy decisions — from authorizing raids on election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, to backing lawsuits demanding access to unredacted voter roll data.
While the exact details of the supposed Iranian interference Trump referenced in his post remain unclear, prominent election conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne — who pushed Trump to seize voting machines immediately after the 2020 election — told WIRED the claim ties back to a sprawling, long-running conspiracy theory that also implicates Venezuela and China.
Like the vast majority of election denial conspiracy theories, this narrative is convoluted and entirely unsupported by tangible evidence. The theory first emerged in the months immediately after the 2020 election and has grown even more elaborate in the years since. At its core, it falsely claims the Venezuelan government spent decades rigging elections worldwide by founding voting technology firm Smartmatic as a tool to remotely alter election results. (Smartmatic has repeatedly denied all accusations against it, and successfully won a defamation lawsuit against right-wing media outlet Newsmax for spreading these false conspiracy claims.)
Byrne laid out the full version of his conspiracy theory in a 45-minute presentation uploaded to X in 2024, and his claims have circulated widely among election denial circles in the time since.
Per Byrne’s narrative, Iran’s role in the alleged scheme is to launder and hide the operation’s money trail. “They act as paymasters. They keep certain payments that would reveal this [operation] out of the banking system, out of the Swift system so you can’t see it,” Byrne claimed during the presentation. “It’s done through a transfer pricing mechanism run through Iran in oil.”
When WIRED asked Byrne for evidence supporting his claims about Iran’s role in the conspiracy, he did not respond. None of Byrne’s core claims have ever been independently verified, and the vast majority have been repeatedly debunked by independent experts and investigators. Smartmatic also did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest allegations.
There are two publicly documented, confirmed cases of Iranian election interference in recent U.S. cycles, though they bear no relation to Byrne’s conspiracy claims: In 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice charged two Iranian nationals with running an influence operation that targeted and threatened American voters. In 2024, three Iranian hackers affiliated with the Iranian government were charged with hacking the Trump campaign as part of an effort to disrupt that year’s presidential election.
Byrne’s unsubstantiated claims are entirely unrelated to these confirmed incidents. Though Byrne’s theories have circulated in online conspiracy communities for years, they were shared directly with Trump via email in recent months by Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who has known Trump since their time as students at New York Military Academy. Ticktin also represents Tina Peters, a former Colorado election official who became a leading figure in the U.S. election denial movement.
Attached to that email was a 17-page draft executive order that Ticktin, Byrne, and other election deniers have spent years developing. Legal experts have widely rejected the draft order, which falsely claims Trump can declare a national emergency over purported foreign election interference and take direct control of U.S. election administration. The Washington Post first reported last week that Ticktin has been pushing the White House to adopt the draft order. While Trump has told reporters he has no knowledge of the draft executive order, he has recently signaled he is open to bypassing Congress to issue an order that would grant him control over U.S. elections.
“There are many people [within government] who are looking at this and who are advocating for the executive order to be signed, and it has to be one that declares an emergency,” Ticktin told WIRED, declining to name any government officials involved in the push.
Though it remains unclear exactly what role Trump claims Iran played in the 2020 election, he has been far more explicit about his claims regarding the Iranian government’s role in 2024.
“They tried twice,” Trump told ABC News on Sunday, referencing two alleged Iranian-backed plots to target and potentially assassinate him during the 2024 presidential campaign, which federal prosecutors have previously outlined. “I got him before he got me,” Trump added, a comment referencing reports that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes.
