☕️ TRUMP CARD ☙ Friday, July 17, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

President Trump delivered a historic election-integrity speech that broke media's mind. Was it a list of lies? Was it easily debunked? Or was it a massive move they never saw coming? Get ready.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Thanks to the press of momentous current events, we have another special-edition roundup: President Trump’s historic election-integrity speech last night. Was it another dud, like corporate media says? Or did it move the needle right off the gauge? I’ll break it down for you.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

Shortly before last night’s historic speech, at least three of the alphabet networks reneged on their agreements to give Trump prime time. Then corporate media sullenly refused to link to certain parts of the story that are arguably more than a little important.

So, here are a few helpful resources before we dig in:

• A PBS streaming video on YouTube of Trump’s entire speech. I put an index to the video with topical links below.

• The new White House Election Integrity website. It should be titled, “Here is the evidence.”

• Not one single “news” platform published a transcript of the whole thing. So I did it. The unedited transcript is included at the end of today’s post, along with helpful subtitles for easier navigation.

Topical Links to Trump’s Speech

The address covered a range of economic and security topics, followed by a detailed focus on election integrity. Here is a breakdown of the key sections, with helpful time stamps from the PBS video linked above:

• Economic and Social Overview: (16:39 - 21:23) Highlights regarding inflation, tax cuts (including provisions for tips, overtime, and Social Security), record stock market performance, healthcare cost reductions, and border security statistics.

• Election Integrity Initiatives: (21:23 - 23:35) Discussion on the importance of trust in elections and the announcement of declassifying government documents concerning election infrastructure vulnerabilities.

• China’s Alleged Election Meddling: (23:35 - 30:53) Claims regarding the compromise of US voter files, alleged cover-ups by intelligence officials, and reports of attempts to influence domestic sentiment and election outcomes.

• Infrastructure Vulnerabilities: (30:56 - 34:45) Allegations concerning the security of electronic voting machines and reports of digital interference in Venezuelan elections.

• Evidence of Fraud and Non-Citizens: (34:47 - 35:56) Discussion of alleged voter registration fraud in Michigan and statistics regarding non-citizens registered on voter rolls.

• Proposed Reforms and Call to Action: (38:56 - 42:17) The administration’s plan to notify states of security findings, orders to remove ineligible voters, and an appeal for Congress to pass the Save America Act, which includes photo voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements.

Now let’s get to it.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🗳️🗳️🗳️

Yesterday at 9pm EDT, President Trump delivered the excitedly hyped ‘potpourri’ speech although nobody really knew what it would be about. I suggested staying open-minded but pegging expectations carefully and not getting carried away with the hot takes. I was right and wrong. It was Trump at his best. Obviously, the New York Times didn’t like it, reporting, “Takeaways From Trump’s Speech Claiming Election Vulnerabilities and China Interference.” Sneering began right in the subheadline: “Documents released by the Trump administration to support the president’s claims did not back up his most aggressive statements.”

I could dissect the Times’s entire, terrible article and show the various tricks it used to falsely ‘fact-check’ the President. But I will just tackle one illustrative example that will tear down the curtain, and I’ll take the most significant claim that the President made.

The bylined reporters —Julian Barnes (intelligence beat) and Maggie Haberman (Trump beat), two of the paper’s most senior scribblers— only cited short, cherry-picked one-liners from Trump’s speech. For each topic, Barnes and Haberman generously gave themselves paragraphs and paragraphs of argument, but stingily gave Trump just one or two simple declarative sentences.

No debate society on the planet gives one side a few seconds to blurt out a sentence or two, then gives the other side minutes for a rebuttal. So the story only pretended to be a fair debate. It wasn’t. Nor did they allow a single word for any outside expert or source who agrees with Trump. It just wasn’t there.

🗳️ So here is today’s example. The Times reported that the President declassified intelligence documents from the Biden era that, among other things, prove that the intelligence community knew —but officially said nothing— that “China had bought, stolen or hacked tens of millions of voter data files across 18 states.”

Come on, Times. “Tens of millions?” What the documents actually showed is that China bought, stole, or hacked voter files on two hundred and twenty million Americans. I’m not sure, because I am only a lawyer, not a mathematician, but since kids and many chronic videogame players don’t vote, 220 million could include pretty much all of us.

And that is how Barnes and Haberman repeatedly summarized and downplayed Trump’s evidence. They took every opportunity to put their fat thumbs unfairly on the scale, using their words —not Trump’s— and their data— not Trump’s. They shrunk whatever Trump claimed. Shrinked it. Whatever. Honey, I shrank the evidence.

Had they used correct grammar, the reporters should have said that China got “hundreds of millions” of U.S. voter files, not tens. The Times’s choice to use the inaccurate and misleading “tens of millions” was not a slip-up, typo, or boo-boo. It was intentional, designed to miniaturize Trump’s most important claim into something that, while bad, wasn’t really that bad. Could have been worse.

But it literally couldn’t have been worse. China got it all. In other words, the Times was deliberately misleading its readers. Misleading readers about elections.

Now, I have been repeatedly informed that misleading people about elections is the worst, most deplorable, horrific thing possible, and it also threatens to destroy democracy itself. But I guess the Times excepts itself from that rule. Free speech! (Free for the NYT only, though. Not you, dummy.) Sigh. Again, I digress. Moving along.

🗳️ Let’s see how Barnes and Haberman treated the newly declassified documents showing, not just the shocking Chinese project to hoover up supposedly secured data on every living American voter for some unknown reason, but the equally shocking disclosure that our own intelligence services, whose job is literally to prevent that from happening, covered it up. Surely, this point, at least, they’d credit to Trump?

Nope. They didn’t let the President win a single point, not even this one. Not in any category. Almost like that was the whole idea.

Here’s how Barnes and Haberman framed it, using a classic limited hangout technique:

“It is true,” they admitted, “that the documents show an intense debate among intelligence officials about alerting their superiors.” Then they immediately downshifted, deploying the shrink ray again. “Officials have long known that China obtained voter data— publicly available information often purchased by political campaigns.” Then they cited anonymous “former intelligence officials” who claimed to know why China acquired the data. Mind readers.

China’s motives seem like a pretty important point. Why did Barnes and Haberman fail to identify the expert authorities who claimed it was “just” for “influence campaigns?”

They provided no names, no titles, no agencies, no indication those officials actually worked the operation, saw the raw reporting, or participated in the “intense debate among intelligence officials about alerting their superiors” that the article briefly conceded. For a question this central —“did China get this to change votes or to target them?”— they asked readers to blindly trust a faceless, fungible group of ex‑spooks.

Isn’t that always the case with Democrats? It always boils down to the demand for blind trust. Every. Single. Time. Trust the science! Just take the damned shot. Somebody should take their trust pens away. Safety first.

🔥 But that’s just the beginning of the utter incoherence of the Times’s purported “fact check.” Their argument literally makes no sense. I’ll give you three solid examples.

First, the reporters admitted that intelligence officials had an “intense debate.” In the very next sentence, they claimed everyone already knew and anyway it was just off-the-shelf marketing data. But if that were true, if there was ‘nothing to see here,’ then why was there an intense debate about it? The two sentences contradict each other.

The words “intense debate” are doing a lot of work. Axios reported about one of the newly disclosed FBI internal emails: “Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running ‘a shadow government’ (quote-unquote) to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known.”

Second, the idea that the data was ‘publicly available’ seems equally moronic. China may have bought some data, but they also hacked and stole other data. Why hack and steal when you can just buy? In other words, by definition we’re not just talking about public data.

The risky act of hacking and stealing implies that some of the information was either not available on the open market, or not in the form or completeness they wanted, or not obtainable without triggering alarms. The Times was generous in imputing an innocent motive to the Chinese. But then why did they hide it?

Barnes and Haberman didn’t speculate about China’s motive for secrecy. And, if China’s motive was so innocent, why did the IC have an “intense debate” and then decide not to tell the President? They didn’t speculate about that one, either.

🗳️ Third, Barnes and Haberman then continued to the biggest grift of all. They are slicing China’s motives as thin as the toilet paper at a gas station. Without a shred of evidence, the dynamic duo claimed —try to follow me here— that China was not using the data to interfere with our elections— but only to influence our elections. Get it? See the difference?

Interfere = bad. Influence = just fine, nothing to see here.

The problem is, this nifty semantic distinction is newly discovered. Let’s check a few historic Times headlines. To be totally fair to the Times, we won’t even use ancient ones. Let’s just look at one recent year, 2018. First, a headline from December 17th, 2018:

It’s right there in the headline: “Influence Operations.” So, it’s fine, right? Nope. “Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” the Times reported, “for instance, to influence opinion on Syria by promoting Bashar al-Assad.” See? In 2018, ‘influence’ and ‘interference’ were synonymous.

Where are all the Grey Lady’s complaints about Chinese “influence operations?”

From February, 2018:

There it is again! “Influence,” right in the headline. This story’s lede framed the Mueller indictment as “concrete evidence to a contentious political discourse regarding Russia’s interference in American democracy,” even though the alleged conduct was mostly social‑media trolling, ad buys, and rallies— i.e., influence. But it still called the Russian influence operation “information warfare” aimed at “instilling distrust toward the candidates and the political system overall.”

From October, 2018:

This headline even said, “Interfering.” So Russia must have been hacking voting systems, right? Nope. This story labeled a largely online “information warfare” initiative —domain registrations, Facebook/Instagram ads, Twitter content— as “interfering in midterm elections” and “meddling with the previous election,” again using the language of interference and influence synonymously.

🗳️ But no longer. In Barnes and Haberman’s fact-checking 2026 article, after a single Trump speech, the Times’s vocabulary has now flipped. They quoted unnamed “former intelligence officials” saying China gathered the voter data “not to manipulate voting results, but instead to better craft influence campaigns to shape voters’ perceptions.” Bless those crafty Chinese communists’ little hearts!

The reporters presented that narrow distinction as completely exculpatory— proof that, not only wasn’t this the bad kind of “interference,” but they even normalized it— the same thing they called a threat to democracy in 2018 is now unremarkable. Hey, come on, everyone does it.

So, since Trump said it, the word influence has now been miniaturized. Only direct manipulation of “vote tabulation systems” —interference— now counts as a bad thing. They don’t even call it influence anymore; now they are just “campaigns to shape voter perceptions.” Even though, eight years back, the same Times repeatedly and hysterically labeled Russian social‑media influence campaigns —also ‘to shape voters’ perceptions’— as terrifying ‘interference operations,’ ipso facto.

Again, they offered zero evidence that China didn’t interfere in U.S. elections, even under the newly revised, stricter 2026 definition of “interference.” (Note that quotes from anonymous “former intelligence officials” aren’t evidence. At best, that line is unconfirmable opinion testimony.) But they did concede that China is using hacked and stolen voter information to conduct influence operations— which under their own 2018 standard is interference. Like I said, it’s incoherent.

🔥 That, my friends, is just one example of how badly Barnes and Haberman thrashed each of Trump’s claims. If I fisked the whole fetid article, it would be a small novel. But you get the idea.

If they have to work this hard to mislead, pollute the facts, and distract readers, what does it say about their debunking arguments? About Trump’s speech?

The Barnes/Haberman piece has to work very hard to keep readers calm: minimize the scale (“tens of millions” instead of nearly all voters), rebrand hacked and stolen data as “publicly available information,” rely on unnamed “former intelligence officials” to divine China’s benign motives, and aggressively separate “influence campaigns” from “interference” in a way their own 2018 coverage did not.

When your argument is solid, you don’t need this much semantic wrangling and hand-waving at anonymous reassurances; you can lay out the documents, even-handedly show the limits, and let the reader see the gaps. Here, they’re constantly massaging their story so that nothing Trump surfaced can be allowed to count as serious evidence of “vulnerabilities.”

That effort level is itself a tell: if the Intelligence Community and Democrats’ narrative about “nothing to see here” around China’s voter‑data-harvesting operation were comfortably true, the piece could have been much more straightforward. The fact that it leans so heavily into wordplay, shrink rays, and selective frames suggests they know the declassified documents are, at minimum, embarrassing.

But at the same time, we should meet our own standard and be intellectually honest. Trump didn’t disqualify the two Georgia Senators. He didn’t disclose any evidence of actual voting manipulation in 2020— or any other year. Barnes and Haberman enthusiastically quoted the President’s own declassification lead, John Solomon, who conceded to reporters that the intelligence documents “show no evidence that votes in election machines were changed in the past three elections.” (That was the one and only time they quoted John. Shocker.)

But. The President did declassify enough to show intolerable levels of election vulnerability. And that was the point.

🗳️ Trump’s speech can be summarized with how he ended it, with his final call to action:

Cynically, you could even call last night’s speech a political commercial aimed at passing the SAVE Act. Either way, Trump must have known that Democrats and corporate media would react by dismissing everything and fact-checking the speech into oblivion. So what was he really up to?

This speech fits Trump’s classic, masterful pattern: he’s not just arguing about 2020, he’s repositioning the battlefield by forcing adversarial facts into the record, shifting blame onto institutions, and creating a new narrative frame to which he can keep returning.

Democrats and media rushed to “debunk” him. But, in the process, they had to repeat and legitimize the core factual disclosures. Even the Barnes/Haberman Hydra had to concede that China “bought, stole or hacked” voter data, that there was “intense debate” about warning superiors, that superiors weren’t warned, and that (at minimum) China used the data for “influence campaigns to shape voters’ perceptions.”

That’s Trump using the system’s knee-jerk defensiveness to spread his narrative. Remember, he often exaggerates things just to induce the media into fact-checking him, by arguing his side of the substantive debate, putting his facts on the table, while thinking they are debunking the hyperbolic claim.

Here’s what Trump actually said, in a nutshell: Foreign adversaries have massive access to voter data, the watchers —U.S. intelligence— hid or minimized it, and the formal guardrails on elections are weaker than advertised.

It was classic Trump: make your opponents carry your message while thinking they’re killing it. Trump uses hyperbole as bait: he knows the Times would rush to swat down the phrase “stolen election,” and in doing so, it would end up informing readers that China did, in fact, hack and steal nearly all available voter data, and that U.S. intelligence did, in fact, debate it and bury the story.

That’s why I was both right and wrong about the speech. I was right that no “smoking gun” on 2020 was delivered. I was wrong in thinking the speech would be a potpourri of whatever Trump wanted to talk about. (In fairness, that’s what his own officials said he’d do. So.) In fact, it was a critical building block preparing the battlespace for what comes next.

🗳️ Trump’s speech reminded me of how, during the pandemic, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did something structurally similar. Before announcing big moves like banning vaccine passports or prohibiting mandatory masking in public schools, he convened public roundtables with outside experts —Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Scott Atlas, and others— and let them argue the case for him in front of cameras, streamed to the world.

Those panels were explicitly designed to give his policy decisions a visible “expert record” and force critics to attack not just him, but the data and arguments aired on‑stage. He was just following the science.

Trump’s election‑integrity rollout —speech, declassifications, a new website— was like the national‑level version of DeSantis’s Florida playbook. They’re not identical. DeSantis’s panels were calm, lawyerly, technocratic, and highly curated; Trump’s speech was populist and hyperbolic. But that’s just a stylistic difference.

The underlying strategy —create a public “Here is the evidence” moment that precedes and justifies a controversial move— is strikingly similar. But … what controversial move could Trump be planning? That is the only real question.

🗳️ We don’t know the plan. (Nor should we.) But President Trump holds the declassification card. No administration in history has ever declassified so much information from the intelligence community. You could call this power a Trump Card. He just played another hand. Now recall another classic Trump strategy: He makes an argument with apparent holes in it and lets his outraged adversaries get out over their skis.

Then, the President resolves those ‘problems’ by playing new cards of declassified information in Round II. Ante up.

He did exactly this with the Epstein disclosure drip-out. He made it look like they pulled the information reluctantly out of his administration. Then a bunch of progressives and Democrats got steamrolled.

So this could just be the first tranche of declassified documents. That’s one possibility.

The second option is that Trump is letting his opponents reframe the debate onto ground he prefers. He didn’t really argue that the 2020 was stolen. His real argument is that our elections are vulnerable to being stolen— which is all he needs to prove to justify a major new move.

Just think about it. If China can hoover up ‘secure’ voter information on every US voter, and the intelligence agencies are helpless to prevent it or even surface the problem, how secure is our system anyway?

If Trump’s critics admit that the data is being used “to better craft influence campaigns to shape voters’ perceptions,” how can you say our elections aren’t vulnerable?

In other words, even without documentation of a single actual tabulation flip, the capacity for targeted pressure, manipulation, and exploitation is enormous. The vulnerabilities are baked in. Even in the Times’ miniaturized version, the argument proves itself.

“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,” President Trump said last night. “They are bad.”

Personally, I can’t wait for Act II. How about you?

Have a terrific Friday! The full transcript of Trump’s speech is down below the ending block. Return promptly tomorrow morning for another terrific roundup of essential news and C&C commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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President Trump’s Primetime Address on Election Security

Date: July 16, 2026

Economic and National Security Successes

Good evening. Before we begin, I’m proud to report that our country is safer, stronger, and far wealthier than it has ever been before. We are doing great. Less than two years ago, we inherited an economic and social disaster. After the worst inflation in 48 years, the wide-open borders with millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, including criminals of all types, and 11,888 murders, many of whom killed more than one person. We had transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation. But not anymore. Two years ago, our country was dead. Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. America is respected like we have never been respected before. We have more money being invested in the United States than at any time in the history of our country. More Americans are working today than ever before.

This week, it was announced that inflation saw the largest monthly decline in more than six years. Just happened. Was just given out, the media reported it, and we accept it. The best in six years. The tax cuts in our great, big, beautiful bill are saving hard-working families thousands and thousands of dollars, like with the provisions: no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors, along with the interest deduction on a loan used to purchase a car, but only if that car is made in America, and a 100% expensing for our job-creating businesses. Our stock markets are at their highest point in many years, but we can actually say of all time. And your 401(k)s, pensions, and retirement accounts are setting records every single day, the highest in history.

For years, we paid the highest price for prescription drugs anywhere in the world. Now, we pay the lowest price under my most favored nations policy because I was able to get the rest of the world and the pharmaceutical companies to act responsibly. Drug prices are coming down by 70, 80, and 90%. TrumpRx.gov, this will ultimately reduce the cost of healthcare. You have to go to TrumpRx.gov and take advantage of it. But the cost of healthcare is coming way down because of what we’ve done with prescription drugs. And with Trump accounts, every child in America now has access to a tax-free investment account to save for their future.

Billions and billions of dollars are being invested, put in by companies and individuals to take care of our children, so that at age 18, they will have potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in their account, and they’ll get off to a great start in life. So for that, go to TrumpAccounts.gov and sign up your child or any child you’d like to sign up.

Our previously wide-open borders have been transformed into the most secure borders in the history of our country, with zero illegal aliens being admitted to the United States in the past 14 months. That is zero. Nobody thought it was possible. We had the worst border in the history of our country, and now we have the best.

Crime is plummeting nationwide, with the murder rate at its lowest level since 1900, or more than 125 years ago. We’re making a record investment in our armed forces, and we have the strongest and most powerful military by far anywhere in the world. I built it during my first term, and unfortunately, we’re forced to use it now. We won in Venezuela, which is now working with us to produce millions and millions of barrels of oil. We are likewise winning big in Iran, and you will see the fruits of that labor very, very shortly. America is back and doing really well.

The Challenge of Election Integrity

But 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. And 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 to 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 beautiful, our great 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. That’s 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’re doing. The documents cover five major areas of concern.

Five Major Areas of Concern: Foreign Interference and Cover-Ups

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 US 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 assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project.

Compounding the travesty, the 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 agency 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. US spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020.

When they discovered that tens of millions of voter data, think of that, tens of millions of voters’ data in 18 states have 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 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 is 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, and they just didn’t want it, they fought like hell not to have Donald Trump to win, and for good reason. As the documents we are releasing show, CIA reporting explicitly stated, and I quote, ‘In mid-2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the US president in an effort to reduce the US president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his re-election.’ Isn’t that nice? Also in mid-2018, China was working to influence the results of the US 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 US 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, and this is by the CIA, the strategy included efforts to use Chinese contacts with big US companies to influence US business leaders to turn against the president of the United States of America. The Chinese government sought to identify US journalists who had reported negatively on the US president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could, and they didn’t care what they said. The Chinese government wanted US 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 was kept out that was of importance. 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,’ unquote, to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known and to keep it away from the honorable press. Other officials who witnessed such efforts perceived the motivations to be blatantly political.

Recently, we found significant numbers of burn bags information, and this is a group of 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 at a different level by different people incinerated and checked, but it never happened. Maybe we got lucky. We believe this was not done on purpose, but rather through gross incompetence of the people that were supposed to burn the bags. But the findings are stunning. Today, I’m 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.

Vulnerabilities in Election Infrastructure

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. Dishonest almost all. They’re vulnerable, and they’re easily compromised, and people within our government knew that. Tonight, we’re publishing a series of previously classified US Intelligence Community assessments and other reports proving that our government has long known these machines are extremely exposed to attack.

As one assessment states, we judge that the United States’ adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure. That’s unquote, but that’s some statement, isn’t it, made by supposedly great patriots of our country. The document goes on to further state that, 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 this access to these systems to disrupt election processes within the United States of America.’ Tonight, we’re releasing all of those findings and spanning from January 2020 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.

Covered-Up Fraud and Ineligible Voters

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, corrupt group, in Muskegon, and were so concerned by what they found, they were just so concerned, they couldn’t 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, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to their number of applications that 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 killed it. 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, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. Since Democrat states refuse to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that. Yet even this limited analysis found more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote.

Media Complicity and Call to Action

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 US voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and 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 non-citizens 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 LA and Governor was held on June 2nd, a long time ago, but it was just completed a few days ago on July 10th. Think of that, much more than one month. 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 multi-billion dollar in value airwaves for absolutely no money. They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting. They pay nothing for multi-billion 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’re 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. And it should not be a partisan issue. It should 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’re 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’re 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. And we’re also committing to be working 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 non-citizens 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 wouldn’t 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’re going away on business or vacation.

These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I’ve 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.