Excerpted from a transcript of the president’s prime-time address on July 16, 2026.
I’ve called for bold, swift, and decisive action to protect the integrity of America’s elections. The documents we will release starting tonight…cover five major areas of concern.
CCP interference
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 U.S. 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] our intelligence agencies 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.
Compromised spy agencies
U.S. 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 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…. The coverup of this colossal 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….
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 U.S. president in an effort to reduce the U.S. 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 U.S. mid-term 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 U.S. president…. [The CIA found that] 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; and they didn’t care what they said. The Chinese government wanted the U.S. president to lose the next election. And the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them….
Compromised presidential briefings
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 “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 “a shadow government” 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….
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 coverup, and to file criminal charges, if appropriate, against these people.
Yet concealing China’s meddling was only the beginning….
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.
Also see:
CNBC: Pres. Trump delivers prime-time address on election integrity
