by WorldTribune Staff, July 16, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
President Donald Trump on July 16 ordered investigations into what he called a years-long effort by intelligence officials to conceal evidence of Chinese interference in the 2020 election, after announcing the declassification of intelligence records he said expose major vulnerabilities in the nation’s election infrastructure.
In a prime-time address from the White House, that was not carried by ABC, NBC and CNN, Trump said the newly-released documents show China obtained the personal information of approximately 220 million American voters and that intelligence agencies suppressed information about the alleged breach from the White House, Congress and the American public.
Trump announced he is directing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the CIA to investigate why the information was allegedly withheld, dismiss employees involved in what he called the cover-up, and pursue criminal charges “if appropriate.”
Trump then said that the documents addressed five primary findings, first among them that China had illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files and that members of the U.S. Intelligence Community had withheld that information from him.
“This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare. The intelligence even shows that China signed a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project,” Trump said.
The president went on to assert that China had actively sought to undermine him during his first term, in part by paying journalists to report negatively on his administration.
The second set of documents outlined efforts by Intelligence Community to withhold knowledge of Chinese interference and electoral weakness from him during his first term.
For Trump, the bottom line was a plea to senators to approve the SAVE America Act, a voter ID bill that has yet to be passed by the U.S. Senate.
Wow! FBI official actually wrote in an email they were running a “shadow government” to keep President Trump and the public from knowing about China’s election meddling in 2020 pic.twitter.com/My2Q9Ftz1M
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) July 17, 2026
Following is a transcript of the portion of President Trump’s remarks on election security:
Election Integrity: A New Disclosure
For many years, I’ve called for a 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’m 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. Beautiful, 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 First Disclosure: China’s Data Compromise
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 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 has assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project.
The Second Disclosure: A Cover-Up by the Deep State
Compounding the travesty, the second set of documents we are releasing reveals that members of the deep state — 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 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 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, 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 didn’t want it. They fought like hell not to have a Donald Trump 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 reelection.” 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 the 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, shows 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 a significant number of burn bags — 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.
The Third Disclosure: Vulnerable Voting Machines
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.” 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, 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
Election Security Concerns
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 a 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 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 2, long time ago, but it was just completed a few days ago on July 10.
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.
Media Coverage and Reaction
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 airways 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.
A Call for Unity
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.
Administration’s Response
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.
The Save America Act
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.
Closing Remarks
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.
