Red state's GOP election chief blows a hole in Trump's primetime speech scare

President Donald Trump used a primetime address Thursday night to sound the alarm about foreign threats to American elections, and one of his own party's top election officials responded that, in effect, his state hasn't heard about any.

West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner, a Republican, former state GOP chairman, and a Trump appointee to a U.S. Department of Agriculture post during his first term, issued a statement Friday after the president's speech, asserting no one in the federal government has flagged a genuine danger to his state's upcoming vote.

"West Virginia has yet to receive a call from the White House, the intelligence community, or any other federal agency, alerting us to a real, existing threat to our 2026 general election," Warner said.

He framed that federal silence as consistent with his own office's findings.

"That's great news for us, because it's exactly what we're seeing on our end, as well," he added.

Warner said the state stays open to "any actionable intelligence," but until it arrives, "we'll stay the course."

The statement landed hours after Trump falsely alleged that China pulled off the largest compromise of election data in history and that intelligence officials buried it. Analysts who reviewed the declassified documents he released found nothing to back the claim, and a March 2021 intelligence assessment had already concluded that China did not deploy efforts to change the 2020 outcome.

Warner, West Virginia's chief elections officer, has broken with the stolen-election narrative before. During his 2024 campaign, he said he did not believe the 2020 election was stolen in West Virginia.