President Trump used newly declassified intelligence and government files to accuse China, U.S. intelligence officials, the Biden Justice Department and election administrators of concealing foreign interference, fraud and systemic vulnerabilities, while calling for investigations, voter-roll purges and passage of the SAVE America Act.
He says the documents prove China engaged in a massive cyber attack to steal voter data, influence the 2020 election, and sabotage his first term in office — and the U.S. “deep state” either cooperated or covered it up.
“Our purpose in disclosing this information is not to weaken confidence in elections, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly,” he said.
“The People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history,” Trump said. “Hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments.”
“Members of the deep state…worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.”
“They ‘deliberately massaged’ the Presidential Daily Briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election,” he said. “Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running, quote, ‘a shadow government.’”
“We will be working closely to mitigate any harm, and we are taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again.”
We still have a major challenge that must be urgently addressed because no country can be great without fair and honest elections. You have to trust your country because if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness. That’s very simple. No trust, no greatness.
For many years, I have called for bold, swift and decisive action to protect the integrity of America’s elections.
Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system—and that is to make that system secure—one where cheating and interference are not just difficult, but virtually impossible.
Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard.
Tonight, I am announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.
This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes—and really exposes, like levels never thought possible—the hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.
Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you, the American people—our great and beautiful American people.
But that all changes right now.
The documents we will release, starting tonight, have been gathered by the White House Government Transparency Task Force—a great group of people—along with the staff of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, supported by our top intelligence agency chiefs, who have all personally reviewed the findings we are presenting this evening and fully confirmed their authenticity.
You can see these documents for yourself at WhiteHouse.gov. Go check it out.
Our purpose in disclosing this information is not to weaken confidence in elections, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly. And that’s what we are doing.
The documents cover five major areas of concern.
First, they show that over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.
That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities—which is exactly what was happening.
This data loss presents an unprecedented election-security nightmare.
The intelligence even shows that China has assigned a data-exploitation unit specifically to this new project.
Compounding the travesty, this second set of documents we are releasing reveals that members of the deep state—a very, very famous group of people, in many cases in our intelligence agencies—worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.
Covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible.
U.S. spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter-registration files in 2020, when they discovered that tens of millions of voters’ data—think of that, tens of millions of voters’ data—in 18 states had been bought, stolen or hacked by China.
Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden. They did not disclose it to me as president or to anyone else, and to the best of our knowledge, they did not inform Congress.
In fact, all they kept saying was, “This is the most secure election in the history of our country”—a standard, very pat line that was divvied out to say.
The cover-up of this colossal security breach is even more disturbing in light of the additional information showing that China engaged in other election-related activities to undermine my first administration and our 2020 campaign.
They did not want—they just did not want it. They fought like hell not to have it—for Donald Trump to win. And for good reason.
The documents we are releasing show CIA reporting explicitly stated, quote, “In mid-2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S. president in an effort to reduce the U.S. president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection.”
Isn’t that nice?
Also, in mid-2018, China was working to influence the results of the U.S. midterm elections and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself.
Separately, in mid-2019, the Chinese government’s strategy against the United States was focused on undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president.
They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job. And they did everything possible to do exactly that.
Going on, this document says—this is by the CIA—this strategy included efforts to use Chinese contacts with big U.S. companies to influence U.S. business leaders to turn against the president of the United States of America.
The Chinese government sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him—as many as they could. And they did not care what they said.
The Chinese government wanted the U.S. president to lose the next election. And the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them, charged them billions and billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs, and built the strongest military anywhere in the world.
We have the strongest military anywhere in the world.
These are exact quotes from the CIA reporting. The name of the person doing the quote is now under review.
But it gets even worse.
Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.
Documents show that during this period, dozens of significant CIA and NSA reports about China’s election targeting were kept out of the presidential briefing.
These were briefings I would get almost every day. Everything of importance was kept out.
One email among intelligence analysts admitted that they had, quote, “deliberately massaged the Presidential Daily Briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election.”
Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running, quote, “a shadow government” to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known and to keep it away from the [unclear].
Other officials who witnessed such efforts perceived the motivations to be blatantly political.
Recently, we found significant numbers of burn bags. These are bags that were used to destroy information given by President Barack Hussein Obama to be burned. It was supposed to be burned.
These bags were supposed to be incinerated at a different level by different people, and checked, but it never happened. Maybe we got lucky.
We believe this was not done on purpose, but rather through the gross incompetence of the people who were supposed to burn the bags.
But the findings are stunning.
Today, I am asking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the CIA to investigate how and why such crucial information was hidden; to fire those involved in the cover-up; and to file criminal charges, if appropriate, against these people.
Yet concealing China’s meddling was only the beginning.
The third set of documents we are releasing proves that, for many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot-counting systems.
Ballot-counting systems—dishonest, almost all. They are vulnerable and easily compromised, and people within our government knew that.
Tonight, we are publishing a series of previously classified U.S. intelligence community assessments and other reports proving that our government has long known these machines are extremely exposed to attack.
As one assessment states, quote, “We judge that United States adversaries, including, at a minimum, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.”
That is some statement, made by supposedly great patriots of our country.
The document goes on to further state, quote, “We assess that centralized election-related data repositories, such as voter-registration databases, poll books and other official election websites, are most vulnerable to exploitation, and adversaries could use access to these systems to disrupt election processes within the United States of America.”
Tonight, we are releasing all of those findings, spanning from January 2022 to June 2026.
This is a cyber threat aimed at the very heart of our democracy.
Many people have questioned whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals or change election results on these terrible machines.
Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela—and that’s exactly what happened—conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020. And that’s what they did.
This reporting included precise details about methods the regime developed to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected, even with an audit, no matter how deep they went.
This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past.
The fourth set of documents reveals that even when significant evidence of fraud has been detected, it has been buried and covered up.
Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter-registration operation in Michigan.
In 2020, Michigan State Police raided a Democrat get-out-the-vote organization—a corrupt group—in Muskegon. And they were so concerned by what they found, they just could not believe it, actually, that they contacted the FBI in Detroit.
The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter-registration forms in other people’s names, appeared to submit fraudulent registrations for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to the number of applications they produced.
In other words, it was pay, play and cheat.
The FBI agents working on the case believed that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation and called it [unclear].
Tonight, I’m asking the FBI director to ensure that the matter is fully investigated and to work with the Department of Justice to prosecute those responsible for any crimes.
Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.
According to the DHS review of state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.
Since Democrat states refused to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that.
Yet even this limited analysis found more than one-quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote.
Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it. It is not defensible.
Hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot-counting systems are exposed to hacking, manipulation and corruption.
China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections. Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.
And yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail.
As one example of the insanity, California’s recent election for mayor of L.A. and governor was held on June 2—a long time ago—but it was just completed a few days ago, on July 10.
Think of that. Much more than one month. It took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing.
This is worse than any Third World country. There’s no Third World country that has elections like we have.
In a rare move, NBC and ABC—fake news—have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about.
Because of the fact that they don’t like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it.
They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud, for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.
They can’t have a great country, and that’s true. You can’t have a great country without free and fair elections.
Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.
They use our public airwaves—multibillion-dollar assets in value—for absolutely no money. They pay nothing.
All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting. They pay nothing for multibillion-dollar assets.
Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost.
This cannot be allowed to continue.
Every American, whether you are a Republican, Democrat, independent or otherwise, should be able to agree that we deserve the most secure, honest and fair election system anywhere in the world.
Secure elections should be a partisan—really should just—we should be together: Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody.
It should not be a partisan issue. It should be a cause to unite us, not to divide us.
This should be a cause. We should be united, not divided.
In light of the brand-new and irrefutable information I have revealed tonight, my administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by the People’s Republic of China, and many others.
We will be working closely to mitigate any harm, and we are taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again.
Tomorrow, the secretary of homeland security will hold a briefing to outline his department’s recent work confirming cyber vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems.
They are bad.
We are in the process of informing governors, senators and members of Congress of potential issues in their states.
If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states. And we are committing to fix it.
We are also committing to work with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections.
We have very important elections coming up. We want those elections to be honest.
I’ve also ordered DHS to notify every state about noncitizens on their voter rolls and direct them to remove all ineligible voters from the lists immediately.
But most importantly, addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America Act.
How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat?
The only reason you would not do it is you want to cheat, because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away—or can’t get elected—any other way.
This landmark bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID.
How simple is that? “Could I have your photo, please?” Photo voter ID.
All voters must provide proof of citizenship. “Are you a citizen of our country, please?”
And hopefully there will be no corrupt mail-in ballots, which, if you watched California and so many other places, mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt.
So you would have no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment or travel—if you are going away on business or vacation.
These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I have mentioned.
To all Americans, I ask you to pick up your phone tomorrow, call your representatives in the House and Senate, and demand that they pass the SAVE America Act without delay.
Together, we will restore faith and confidence in our country, and we will be bigger, better and stronger than ever before.
Thank you. God bless you. God bless our great military. And God bless America.
Thank you very much.
