President Donald Trump used a primetime address to allege the “deep state” suppressed Communist Party of China attempts to meddle in the 2020 election.
As Trump made the allegations of election interference from the White House‘s East Room, he declassified intelligence documents presented to him by his White House Government Transparency Task Force and members of his White House Intelligence Advisory Board, claiming they supported his accusations and publishing them on his administration’s official website, whitehouse.gov.
“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,” he said.
“Compounding the travesty, the second set of documents we are releasing reveals that members of the deep state — very, very famous group of people, 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.”
There have been more than 60 legal challenges regarding the 2020 election, where judges, including those appointed by Trump and other Republican presidents, dismissed the cases, including after considering their merits.
“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,” he said. “We’re in the process of informing governors, senators, and members of Congress of potential issues in their states.”
Regardless of the criticism he has received from Democrats, Trump claimed he was not making the allegations to create a glide path to challenge this November’s midterm elections, with many major news outlets, including ABC and NBC, declining to cover his remarks live.
“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.
Here are Trump’s three main allegations.
Chinese interference and the deep state
During his 25-minute address, Trump cited a CIA report, which he alleged claimed that China’s policy in 2018, when he was president, 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.”
“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,” he said. “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.”
In addition, Trump alleged China’s strategy included using “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,” he said.
Trump announced that the author of that CIA report is now “under review.”
Trump went on to allege that “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.”
“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,” he said.
Voting machine vulnerabilities
Trump simultaneously alleged that a third set of documents, intelligence community assessments, and other reports from 2020 to 2026 supported his claim that the public was “blatantly lied to” about the security of the country’s election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems.
“As one assessment states, we judge that the United States adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as nonstate groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure,” he said. “The document goes on to further state that 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.”
Noncitizens on voter rolls and the SAVE America Act
To that end, Trump alleged that the Department of Homeland Security had identified about 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.
“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,” he said. “But most importantly, addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America Act.”
READ IN FULL: TRUMP’S ADDRESS TO THE NATION ON ALLEGED CHINESE INTERFERENCE IN 2020 ELECTION
Trump encouraged his supporters to call their elected representatives and demand that they push the legislation through Congress.
“Together, we will restore faith and confidence in our country, and we will be bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” he said.
