Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump threatened to jail people “involved in unscrupulous behavior” related to voting in the 2024 election, suggesting without evidence that the election could be stolen from him — and prompting widespread condemnation from election officials who said such rhetoric could provoke violence.

Trump’s remarks, made in a social media posting on Saturday night, represent the most overt signal yet that he may not accept the result in November if he loses.

Trump has a history of railing against election officials and raising unsubstantiated claims of fraud when his political fortunes appear uncertain, as they do now in his extremely close race with Vice President Kamala Harris. His comments are his most direct threats made against those tasked with administering elections this year.

In reality, illegal voting is exceedingly rare. But Trump appears to be replaying his efforts to sow doubt about the voting process ahead of the 2020 election — actions that contributed to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Trump wrote on Saturday on his Truth Social platform. “We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T!”

Trump, who began his message with the words “CEASE & DESIST,” went on to threaten a wide range of the kinds of people who would face prosecution and prison time, including campaign donors and those involved in administering elections.

“Please be aware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters & Corrupt Election Officials,” he wrote, adding that such people will be “sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

David Becker, who founded the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, urged the public to reject Trump’s inflammatory language.

“I can’t begin to describe the abnormality and disturbing behavior that would cause a presidential candidate, a former president, to threaten public servants with mass arrest,” said Becker, who previously worked as a lawyer for the Justice Department for seven years.

Several election officials also called threats of violence “unacceptable.”

“Donald Trump will not accept the results of the election unless he wins,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D). “This is another step in his campaign to undermine confidence in our elections, which has led to unprecedented threats of violence against election officials.”

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not reply to a request on Sunday afternoon for comment on Trump’s post.

On Sunday, Trump doubled down on his baseless claims of election fraud, saying on Truth Social that he expects to win the key swing state of Pennsylvania “by a lot, unless the Dems are allowed to CHEAT.”

Late last month, during a conversation with the conservative Moms for Liberty group, Trump conceded that he lost the 2020 election “by a whisker” — marking one of his most clear public acceptances that he lost the election to Biden. Days later, he once again publicly acknowledged that he did not win the 2020 presidential election, telling podcaster Lex Fridman that he “lost by a whisker.”

In the wake of the 2020 election, Trump and his allies pushed to overturn the election results through phone calls, speeches, tweets and media appearances in six swing states where certified results declared Joe Biden the winner.

Trump most recently began escalating his rhetoric about election fraud when Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket and pulled ahead in some polls. In remarks before the Fraternal Order of Police last week, the former president urged officers to patrol polling places because it would intimidate would-be cheaters.

“I hope you watch for voter fraud,” he said. “Watch for the voter fraud because we win without voter fraud. … You can keep it down just by watching because, believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge. They’re afraid of you people.”

But while Trump’s post on Saturday falsely claimed that there was “rampant Cheating” in the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in the last election faltered in multiple courts when his lawyers and allies could not produce evidence of widespread voter irregularities. In nearly four years since, Trump and his allies have failed to substantiate his claims that he lost the 2020 race due to fraud.

In one of those cases, U.S. District Judge Steven D. Grimberg, whom Trump named to the bench in 2019 in the Northern District of Georgia, wrote that the president’s attempt to block certification of Biden’s win in the state “would breed confusion and potentially disenfranchisement that I find has no basis in fact or in law.”

Election officials who are credibly found to have engaged in criminal activities are already prosecuted in the country. Last month, for example, Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado and Trump ally, was found guilty of seven charges connected to allowing a purported computer expert to copy election data from her office as Trump and his allies searched for evidence to prove their baseless claims of election fraud. Another county election official, Misty Hampton of Coffee County, Ga., faces felony charges along with 14 others, including Trump, for their role in trying to overturn the 2020 result.

And, in the years after Trump began baselessly alleging fraud in the 2020 election, some states such as Iowa, Georgia and Arizona have passed laws beefing up penalties for some election-related offenses despite a lack of evidence that elections in their states were run unfairly. In some cases, these new state election laws effectively criminalize election workers’ errors, raising concerns about the possibility of unfair prosecutions like the kind Trump appeared to describe in his post.

Threats and harassment of election workers have skyrocketed since Trump and his allies began denying the results of the 2020 election, amplifying their false claims on television, podcasts and social media. The developments caused a mass exodus of veteran election administrators from their jobs, and prompted scores of election offices around the country to harden their physical workspaces with bulletproof glass, emergency buttons and extensive crisis training.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D), who was directly targeted by armed pro-Trump protesters who gathered outside her home after the 2020 election, on Sunday told The Washington Post that no threats from Trump will dissuade her from performing her duties this election year.

Benson said that her job — and the job of every election official in the country — is to “rise above this noise and focus on continuing to ensure our elections are fair, secure, accessible, and that the results continue to be an accurate reflection of the will of the people.”

Seth Bluestein, a Republican Philadelphia city commissioner, said that every election official he knows “is focused on doing their job well, which unfortunately now also includes preparing for potential threats and violence.”

And Jeff Greenburg, a former director of elections in Mercer County, Pa., said on Sunday that the “continued demonization of election officials is disappointing, disheartening, irresponsible and infuriating.”

“Words matter and this does nothing but potentially put those dedicated public servants in harm’s way. It has to stop,” he said.

On Sunday, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Trump campaign surrogate, minimized Trump’s comments in an interview with NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” saying that the former president was “just putting people on notice” that the country must have “free and fair elections.”

But a Republican official in a battleground state who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about Trump’s comments found the former president’s post more alarming.

“He sounds like he is losing it,” the Republican official said. “Sad, someone should do something, like replace him as a candidate.”

Toluse Olorunnipa contributed reporting.

The Republican leadership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sunday released a sprawling report on the U.S. exit from Afghanistan three years ago, blasting President Joe Biden and his administration as the callous and “dogmatic” orchestrator of a foreign policy failure so extreme that it ranked “far worse” than even America’s catastrophic withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.

Democrats swiftly dismissed the 240-page report, the product of a two-year GOP investigation, as “nakedly partisan” and as the cynical manipulation of tragedy for use as a “political football.”

The document arrives just two months ahead of a tightly contested presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, and on the eve of their highly anticipated debate Tuesday in Philadelphia. Both parties said the timing of its release was intended to underscore Republicans’ recent efforts to revive public scrutiny of the withdrawal, which the committee’s chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), suggested could “disqualify” Harris in the minds of voters.

The committee has said as well that even with the report’s publication, its work will continue with the pursuit of additional witness testimony.

It was Trump, as president in February 2020, who negotiated the oft-criticized deal, known as the Doha agreement, with Afghanistan’s Taliban militant group to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners and withdraw all U.S. forces the following year.

In recent weeks, though, he has aggressively defended his decision to cut a deal while seeking to draw voters’ attention instead to the chaos that ensued in Kabul during August 2021, as Biden executed the agreement and brought America’s longest war to a messy and violent end. Trump last week accused Biden and Harris of bearing responsibility for the suicide bomb attack during the withdrawal that killed 13 U.S. service members “just like they pulled the trigger.”

But while the GOP report contains some minor new details, there are no major revelations that go beyond prior reporting already in the public domain via separate investigations conducted by the Defense Department, the State Department, news outlets and analysts, as well as the foreign affairs committee itself. And it contains no evidence that Harris played a major role in the withdrawal’s execution.

The report focuses intently on the chaotic and desperate noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO), a three-week crisis marred by images of horror as Afghans trying to escape the Taliban’s return to power died amid the crush of desperate crowds, while clinging to departing U.S. planes and in the suicide bombing just outside Kabul’s airport.

Among its findings that the committee emphasized were revelations first publicized months ago, such as the evacuation request coming on the day the Taliban entered Afghanistan’s capital, and one diplomat’s assertion that the U.S. Embassy’s top official had violated covid-19 protocols.

But the report stops short of presenting significant new evidence about the airport attack, an event Republicans have portrayed as the most egregious of Biden’s failures in overseeing the withdrawal. “Debate over whether the Abbey Gate attack was a lone suicide bomber or a complex attack, including gunfire after the bomb, has yet to be resolved,” the report says, citing a lack of aerial surveillance at the time of the attack, and the destruction of evidence by the Defense Department in the aftermath. A person familiar with the Defense Department’s investigation of the bombing said previously that it is true some photographs snapped by a sniper team overseeing the bombing site went missing.

And the report does not fulfill the GOP’s larger promise of accountability to the aggrieved families of the 13 slain Americans, some of whom appeared onstage at the Republican National Convention to show their support for Trump, who has shown them compassion and vowed transparency in ways that they say Biden has not.

“All they want — they want a phone call or a meeting from Harris or from Biden to say, ‘We know we did things wrong. It didn’t go well. And we are taking those lessons into account so that it never happens again,’” said Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), an Afghanistan war veteran who serves on the foreign affairs committee.

It’s unclear how deeply voters will consider the Afghanistan withdrawal when they cast their votes in November, and whether they are willing to link the catastrophic exit to Harris, whom Trump and McCaul have endeavored to cast as a critical decision-maker.

Within the pages of the report, “Biden-Harris administration” appears repeatedly — an adjustment that the committee’s Republican staff said it made in the final weeks of drafting the document. Yet there is scant mention of her as an individual, with the committee appearing to conclude that her most damaging behavior during the withdrawal was her absence of dissent.

“With the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, the GOP performance has reached a crescendo — Republicans now claim she was the architect of the U.S. withdrawal though she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committee’s interview transcripts,” the panel’s Democrats said in a memorandum released simultaneously with the Republican report.

The Harris campaign said in a statement ahead of the report’s release that “Trump gave the Taliban everything they wanted,” referring to the Doha agreement. “Despite the deal’s drastic implications for U.S. military strategy and the safety of U.S. troops and allies, Trump left the Biden-Harris Administration with zero plans for an orderly withdrawal — only a dangerous, costly mess.”

The report’s larger conclusions are unsurprising. It pins the failures of the war’s endgame squarely on the Biden administration, which it says “prioritized the optics of the withdrawal over the security of U.S. personnel on the ground.” The administration’s last-minute move to organize the mass evacuation of noncombatants — largely Afghans who had worked in support of the U.S. mission — “created an unsafe environment” at Kabul’s airport, it says, ultimately resulting in the deaths of 13 service members.

“The Biden-Harris administration knew such an attack was not only possible but likely, yet they still failed to take the appropriate measure to mitigate the risk,” the report states.

What’s more, the report charges, Biden was determined to withdraw — regardless of the cost, the warnings from his generals or the apparent deterioration of security as the Taliban steadily gained ground. It also says officials “misled and, in some instances, directly lied to the American people at every stage of the withdrawal,” and accuses the entire administration of a vast “cover-up” led in large part by the White House National Security Council.

Sharon Yang, a White House spokesperson, characterized the GOP’s report as a “recycled, partisan” attack. “The fact remains,” she said in a statement, “that ending our longest war was the right thing to do and our nation is stronger today as a result.”

Republicans argue otherwise. The aftermath of the withdrawal has degraded U.S. national security and U.S. credibility on the world stage, as Afghanistan has again become “a haven for terrorists,” the report alleges, while America’s Afghan allies who were left behind have faced imprisonment, torture and murder at the hands of the Taliban. The chaotic exit “created a tidal wave of problems in Afghanistan, the United States, and around the world,” the report says, leaving billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons and currency behind to the Taliban. And it “created a crisis within the U.S. military and among American veterans,” undermining recruitment and retention, it claims.

The report allots little space to the 19 years of war and policy decisions that came before the 2021 withdrawal, including under two Republican administrations. That task falls to the bipartisan congressionally mandated Afghanistan War Commission, which will deliver its own comprehensive report in 2026.

Democrats on Sunday panned the new report and noted the total absence of Democratic involvement in its drafting. “It is a politicized, cherry-picked report … a nakedly partisan campaign thing,” the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Himes (Conn.), said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” That is all it was “designed to do,” Himes said — “not shed light on a tragedy.”

The foreign affairs committee’s Democratic staff, led by Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.), produced a 56-page document that largely echoes the administration’s previous defense of its handling of the evacuation. It highlights, for instance, that when the evacuation was over, “the Biden Administration had facilitated the largest humanitarian airlift in U.S. history and ended the United States’ longest war” — a rosy gloss on an endeavor that left thousands of Afghan allies and their families behind.

Meeks, in a letter to fellow Democrats, characterized the Republicans’ report as having excluded “anything unhelpful to a predetermined, partisan narrative” and said their GOP colleagues took “particular pains to avoid facts involving former president Trump.”

Asked on “Face the Nation” whether the GOP’s investigation identified any “mistakes by the Trump administration,” McCaul singled out Zalmay Khalilzad, the envoy Trump dispatched to negotiate the withdrawal with the Taliban. The report heaps ample blame on him while seemingly excusing Trump from Khalilzad’s decision-making.

Khalilzad responded to some of the report’s allegations against him, including the charge that he kept military leaders in the dark during U.S.-Taliban negotiations. “That is factually incorrect,” Khalilzad wrote on social media. “Far from having been kept in the dark, the military … fully participated in the negotiations with the Taliban.” He cited the direct involvement of Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, who was the top commander in Afghanistan at the time of the Doha talks. “No agreement was made on any military issue without the full knowledge of our military leaders and their participation in decisions made by our leaders,” Khalilzad asserted.

He also pushed back on the report’s claim that he personally excluded the Afghan government from the negotiations, writing that the Afghan government and the Taliban were never able to reach a “mutual agreement on a new government” and that “there was widespread pessimism” among U.S. officials “that the Afghan leaders would put their country first and seek a realistic compromise.”

For his part, Trump, in 2021, celebrated Biden’s decision to stick with the withdrawal agreement his administration made with the Taliban — “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do,” he said at the time — and in the weeks before the Afghan government’s collapse, he touted how he’d made it difficult for Biden to do anything other than follow through with the withdrawal he put in motion.

“They couldn’t stop the process,” he said at a political rally in June of that year, referring to the Biden administration. “Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think?” he continued, overstating the length of the conflict by a year. “ … They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.