Here’s why Trump posted about Iran ‘stealing’ 2020 election clocks after US attack

2:30 am ET on Saturday, President Donald Trump posted a video on his Truth Social account in which he announced that the United States had joined Israel in launching attacks on Iran.

His next post, just two hours later, seemed to indicate that the attacks were, at least in part, motivated by a wild claim that Iran helped rig the 2020 US election. “Iran tried to interfere in the 2020 and 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces a renewed war with the United States,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

The post links to an article on Just the News, a conspiracy-laden, pro-Trump outlet that offered no explanation for its claim beyond a vague assertion that Iran conducted a “sophisticated effort to influence the election” in 2020.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether the alleged interference factored into the decision to attack Iran or what exactly the extent of the alleged interference was.

Trump has spent the years since 2020 promoting numerous baseless conspiracy theories about fraud in the 2020 election. Since returning to the White House last year, he has empowered his administration to use debunked conspiracy theories to inform decision-making, from raids of elections offices in Fulton County, Georgia, to lawsuits over unredacted voter rolls.

It’s not entirely clear what supposed Iranian interference Trump was alluding to in his Truth Social post, but Patrick Byrne, a prominent conspiracy theorist who urged Trump to seize voting machines in the wake of the 2020 election, claims to WIRED that it’s connected to a broader conspiracy theory that also includes Venezuela and China.

Like most election-related conspiracy theories, this one is complex and not based on any concrete evidence. Broadly speaking, the conspiracy theory, which first emerged in the weeks and months following the 2020 election and has become more sophisticated in the years since, claims that the Venezuelan government has been rigging elections around the world for decades by creating the voting software company Smartmatic as a way to remotely rig elections. (Smartmatic has repeatedly denied all allegations against it and successfully sued the right-wing outlet Newsmax for promoting conspiracy theories and discrediting the company.)

Byrne laid out the entire conspiracy theory in a 45-minute presentation posted on X in 2024. His claims have been widely shared within the election denial community since they were published.

Byrne claims that Iran’s role in all this was to hide the money trail. “They act as disbursers. They hold certain payments that would reveal that [operation] “Outside the banking system, outside the SWIFT system, so you can’t see it,” Byrne said during this presentation, “and it’s done through a transfer pricing mechanism that runs through Iran in oil.”

When asked about evidence of Iran’s role in this conspiracy theory, Byrne did not respond. In fact, none of Byrne’s claims have ever been verified, and most have been repeatedly debunked. Smartmatic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, there have been two actual documented cases of Iranian election interference: In 2021, the Department of Justice charged two Iranians with conducting an influence operation aimed at targeting and threatening American voters. In 2024, the three Iranian hackers working for the government were accused of endangering the Trump campaign as part of an attempt to disrupt the 2024 election.

But Byrne’s claims were completely different. While Byrne’s claims have circulated among conspiracy groups online for years, they were emailed directly to Trump in recent months by Peter Ticktin, an attorney who has known Trump since they attended the New York Military Academy together. Ticktin also represents former Colorado elections official turned election denial star Tina Peters.