President Donald Trump, as widely predicted, used his primetime address on Thursday night to announce that China has been working to compromise U.S. elections.
While he insisted he was not seeking to undermine confidence in elections, the speech was clearly downstream of years of his assertions, without any evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him.
Trump further announced that he will declassify a huge trove of documents about foreign election interference. "The documents cover five major areas of concern," he said.
The president announced that starting in 2020, "the People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history," obtaining "220 million U.S. voter files," setting up a "data exploitation unit," and trying to "manufacture illegal ballots" for Biden — all to make sure he wouldn't win the election and make him look "not so hot."
He then slammed the "cover-up of this colossal security breach," even though Chinese interference in the election was at no point covered up, was broadly known, and has never been shown to have fraudulently changed the outcome of the election — and he further went on to vow anyone involved in covering up the information would be fired from the U.S. government and prosecuted if appropriate.