President Donald Trump issued a strong warning in a White House address Thursday night that China had orchestrated what he called “the largest compromise of election data in history,” beginning during the 2020 election cycle.
He claimed the breach gave the U.S. adversary access to “220 million U.S. voter files,” including names, addresses, phone numbers and party preferences.
“This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare,” he declared. “The intelligence even shows that China has assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project.”
Trump also cited another group of documents he said are now public, claiming they show that members of the intelligence community, which he called “the deep state,” worked to “actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.” He accused those officials of “covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible.”
According to Trump, intelligence officials learned in 2020 that “tens of millions of voters’ data in 18 states have been bought, stolen or hacked by China,” but “those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden.”
Trump said the alleged cover-up was even more concerning because of additional material he said showed China carrying out election-related efforts aimed at weakening his first administration and his 2020 campaign.
“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 U.S. president in an effort to reduce the U.S. president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his re-election,’” Trump stated. “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.”
Trump further alleged that China adopted a strategy of “undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president” in mid-2019. “The 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.”
Trump then turned to what he described as “the third set of documents we are releasing,” saying they show “that for many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems.” He called U.S. election systems “vulnerable” and “easily compromised,” saying “people within our government knew that” but did not disclose it to the public.
He pointed to one assessment that found “the 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.”
Trump said voter registration databases and official election websites were “most vulnerable to exploitation,” warning that foreign adversaries “could use this access to these systems to disrupt election processes within the United States of America.”
The fourth set of documents, Trump said, showed that “even when significant evidence of fraud has been detected, it has been buried and covered up.” He cited what he described as “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,” he said. “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.”
Trump said the fifth set of documents included findings from a Department of Homeland Security investigation identifying “approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” He suggested the true number is “much higher” because “Democrat states refuse to share their voter files.”
Trump ended the address by outlining what he portrayed as a deeply compromised U.S. election system. “Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it. It is not defensible,” he said.
“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 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 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.”
The president also took aim at California’s ballot-counting process, saying the state’s primary results took more than a month to certify. “This is worse than any third-world country,” he said. “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.”
“Congress must pass the SAVE America Act,” Trump insisted. “This landmark bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID.”
Trump said his administration is in the process of notifying states whose election data was allegedly compromised by China and 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.”
