Trump Says Bureaucrats Buried News China Stole 220 Million Voter Files
The president used his primetime address to boost the SAVE America Act.
The People’s Republic of China stole 220 million U.S. voter files starting during the 2020 election, President Trump told the nation Thursday night.
“This data loss presents an unprecedented election-security nightmare,” he declared in a primetime address from the White House’s East Room, saying it was one of several incidents of foreign attacks on the integrity of American elections. He announced the declassification of documents calling attention to issues surrounding U.S. elections in recent years, including the presence of at least 278,000 noncitizens on voting rolls.
The president said that information released Thursday would 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.”
Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, “as well as non-state groups” could “compromise U.S. election infrastructure,” he said, and cited a CIA report of a plot to rig voting in Venezuela “in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime.”
“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,” he continued.
Mr. Trump began his half-hour speech with a rundown of recent accomplishments including inflation cooling more than expected in June. But he quickly pivoted to election integrity, saying that “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.”
He also called on Americans, regardless of affiliation, to call their representatives and senators to demand passage of the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, mandate photo ID at polling places, and restrict mail-in voting.
“The only reason you wouldn’t do it,” Mr. Trump said of supporting the measure, “is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get elected any other way.”
The president, who often says he was the actual winner of the 2020 election — a contest that saw Joe Biden elected — said the White House would release a tranche of documents and reports from national-security agencies documenting his claims. The papers are now available at www.whitehouse.gov/election-integrity.
Mr. Trump quoted a CIA report that said, “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.”
The president said China’s strategy was to use its contacts with American business leaders to turn them against him and “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.”out him.”
Mr. Trump said the Chinese “wanted me to lose” in 2020 “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.”
Independent journalist Catherine Herridge, a former CBS News and Fox News correspondent, first reported details of the story in April, saying a “credible whistleblower” maintained “the CIA, FBI and other IC agencies suppressed intelligence about China’s influence operations during the 2020 election targeting President Trump and his campaign.”
She wrote that “the CIA, then led by Director Gina Haspel, would not document the Chinese influence operations, in a formal way, out of concern that President Trump would use the intelligence to his advantage.”
Mr. Trump alleged there was a rogue operation within the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency to hide these details from the president’s daily intelligence briefings.
“Everything was kept out that was of importance,” he said, adding that an FBI official “wrote that she was running ‘a shadow government’ to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known and to keep it away from the honorable press.”
Mr. Trump said his administration “found significant numbers of burn bags in formation, and this is a group of bags that were used to destroy information given by President Barack Hussein Obama to be burned.”
He said he would ask the director of national intelligence’s office, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the CIA to investigate the alleged coverup “and to file criminal charges, if appropriate.”
Mr. Trump also said Michigan Democrats were involved in voter fraud during that election.
“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,” he said. “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 president said “the Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation and killed it,” and he has asked FBI Director Kash Patel to reactivate the probe and work with the Justice Department to prosecute those responsible.
His last example of election interference cited a Department of Homeland Security review of state voter rolls and public records that “identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens 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.”
Along with his call for Americans to call Congress about the SAVE America Act, Mr. Trump blasted “NBC and ABC fake news” for not airing his 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,” the president said. “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.”
Mr. Trump said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin will brief reporters Friday on his department’s examination of cyber vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.
 | A guest post by
|