Here’s the 'legal framework' officials will try for Trump 2028: Rick Wilson

Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson on Friday explained the “legal framework” officials will use to ensure President Donald Trump is able to run for a third term — despite the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly stating: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Speaking with Maddie Hale, Wilson revealed “there are people right now exploring how they get the legal framework” for Trump to run for a third term. Wilson described an army of “elected officials and think tank officials and people in this election denier legal community around Trump” who “are all finding — or, trying to find — ways to say ‘the 2020 election was invalid, therefore the 22nd Amendment is invalid.’”

“That’s their current, sort of, winding but explicable legal thinking,” Wilson added.

The Lincoln Project co-founder said he believes that “legal framework” is precisely why Trump gave a poorly-received speech last month accusing China of meddling in the 2020 presidential election.

Trump, in his speech, claimed China "'carried out ‘the largest compromise of election data in history’ starting with the 2020 cycle, illicitly collecting 220 million voter files ‘over a period of years,’” the New York Times reported. The Times described the claim as one of several Trump made that was “either overstated or untethered from reality.”

The Trump “administration published hundreds of pages of documents that were far more measured and reserved in their judgments about China and other election security issues,” the Times noted.

Trump also used the speech to push for his SAVE America Act — a restrictive voter ID bill that’s stalled out in Congress due to a lack of Republican support.

As the AP reports, “Election security experts say America’s decentralized voting system, with the power over elections residing with the states instead of the federal government, is a strength. Americans vote in more than 10,000 different jurisdictions with different rules, making the nations’ elections extraordinarily complicated but safe from widespread fraud.” The AP notes “no credible evidence” shows that foreign actors successfully manipulated the 2020 presidential election, which was conducted under the president’s first term in office."

A March 2021 federal intelligence report stated there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation or reporting results."

Former intelligence officials called the president’s speech “dangerous,” including Sue Gordon, “principal deputy director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term,” the AP reports.

“He had an entire term to deal with it," Gordon told CNN.

The 25-minute primetime address did not present any new evidence of “of a single fraudulent vote cast in any election,” NPR reported last month.