Tells senators voters were illegally bused into New Hampshire, without evidence

During a White House lunch with a bipartisan group of ten senators on February 9, 2017, Trump told attendees -- according to a Republican official with knowledge of the meeting -- that he and former senator Kelly Ayotte would have won New Hampshire in 2016 if not for thousands of voters allegedly bused in illegally from Massachusetts. New Hampshire election officials and the state's Ballot Law Commission found no evidence of any such organized fraud, and Ayotte herself did not attribute her narrow loss to fraud. The claim extended Trump's broader unsubstantiated assertion, made earlier in his term to congressional leaders, that three to five million people voted illegally nationwide in the 2016 election. No verbatim public quote from Trump exists for this specific remark, but senior adviser Stephen Miller defended the underlying busing claim on the record days later, and the false New Hampshire fraud narrative Trump advanced privately here fed into the Election Integrity Commission he established later that year.