NTD Special Coverage: Trump Addresses the Nation

Good evening and thank you for joining us. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Breaking news tonight, President Trump will address the nation from the White House East Room in just a moment. The president promising to deliver really big news on election security. He may also discuss Iran and the economy. We'll go to that live as soon as he starts speaking. But first, here at the desk with me, Gerard Fillitty, political strategist and attorney. Gerard, thank you so much for being here with us. Monumental night here. Now we talked a little bit about this in the last hour, but what are we expecting to hear from the president tonight? Well, that's a good question. I think what we are expecting is to hear more about what he sees as problems of potential election interference by other countries and the need to strengthen our laws and our security precautions when it comes to voting. I think that is the big item on the agenda, whether or not he goes into details about evidence that might exist about China or other countries interfering or actioning on American elections remains to be seen. But we know that the scope here is going to be about the election, election interference and potential in the Save America Act, I think will come up inevitably. So that's the focus tonight. That was going to be my next question about Save America, but the president is here. So let's go and. Evening. Before we begin, I'm proud to report that our country is safer, stronger and far wealthier than it has ever been before. We are doing great. Less than two years ago, we inherited an economic and social disaster after the worst inflation in 48 years, the wide open borders with millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, including criminals of all types and eleven thousand eight hundred and eighty eight murders, many of whom killed more than one person. We had transgender for everybody, men and women sports crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation. But not anymore. Two years ago, our country was dead. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. America is respected like we have never been respected before. We have more money being invested in the United States than at any time in the history of our country. More Americans are working today than ever before. This week, it was announced that inflation saw the largest monthly decline in more than six years just happened, just given out. The media reported it and we accept it the best in six years. The tax cuts in our great big, beautiful bill are saving hardworking families thousands and thousands of dollars, like with the provisions, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors, along with the interest deduction on a loan used to purchase a car. But only if that car is made in America and a 100 percent expensing for our job creating businesses. Our stock markets are at their highest point in many years, but we can actually say of all time and your 401ks, pensions and retirement accounts are setting records every single day, the highest in history. For years, we paid the highest price for prescription drugs anywhere in the world. Now we pay the lowest price under my most favored nation's policy because I was able to get the rest of the world and the pharmaceutical companies to act responsibly. Drug prices are coming down by 70, 80 and 90 percent. Trump Rx.gov. This will ultimately reduce the cost of health care. You have to go to Trump Rx.gov and take advantage of it. But the cost of health care is coming way down because of what we've done with prescription drugs and with Trump accounts. Every child in America now has access to a tax free investment account to save for their future. Billions and billions of dollars are being invested, put in by companies and individuals to take care of our children so that at age 18, they will have potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in their account and they'll get off to a great start in life. So for that, go to Trump accounts dot gov and sign up your child or any child who'd like to sign up. Our previously wide open borders have been transformed into the most secure borders in the history of our country, with zero illegal aliens being admitted to the United States in the past 14 months. That is zero. Nobody thought it was possible. We had the worst border in the history of our country, and now we have the best. Crime is plummeting nationwide with the murder rate at its lowest level since nineteen hundred or more than 125 years ago. We're making a record investment in our armed forces, and we have the strongest and most powerful military by far anywhere in the world. I built it during my first term, and unfortunately, we're forced to use it now. We won in Venezuela, which is now working with us to produce millions and millions of barrels of oil. We are likewise winning big in Iran, and you will see the fruits of that labor very, very shortly. America is back and doing really well, but we still have a major challenge that must be urgently addressed because no country could 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. And that's very simple. No trust, no greatness. 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, the 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 are beautiful, are 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 election, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly. And that's what we're doing. 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 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 has signed a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project. Compounding the travesty, the second set of documents we are releasing reveals that members of the deep state, a very, very famous group of people, in many cases, in our intelligence agency work 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. U.S. spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020 when they discovered that tens of millions of voter data, think of 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 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 in our 2020 campaign. They did not want, and they just didn't want it. They fought like hell not to have it, Donald Trump, to 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 U.S. president in an effort to reduce the U.S. president's votes and make him resign or prevent his re-election. Isn't that nice? 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 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. 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 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 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, charge 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, 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, 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 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. 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 bag. 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. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. election infrastructure. That's 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 and 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 to regime develop 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. The fourth set of documents reveals that even when significant evidence of fraud has been detected, it has been buried and covered up. Among the disclosures tonight are 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, corrupt group in Muskegon. And we're so concerned by what they found. They were just so concerned, they couldn't believe it, actually, that 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. In other words, it was pay, play, and cheat. The FBI agents working on the case believe that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation and killed it. Tonight, I'm asking the FBI director to ensure that the matter is fully investigated and to work with the Department of Justice to prosecute those responsible for any crimes. Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the DHS review, state voter rolls, and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens 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. 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 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 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 L.A. and governor was held on June 2nd, a long time ago, but it was just completed a few days ago on July 10th. Think of that. Much more than one month. It 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. 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, being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. And that was President Trump's primetime address to the nation, focused on election security. We have a lot to unpack here. So back with me in the studio here, Gerard Fillity, political strategist and attorney. And also joining us now, Marley Hornick, political strategist and founder of RealAmerica.Vote. Thank you both so much for joining us. Now, a lot covered there. At the beginning, it almost sounded like a State of the Union address, talking about the economy and then the border and crime going down. Big issues, of course, the midterm coming up there. What maybe stood out to you? So much covered there. Gerard, I want to start with you because you did talk about declassifying a lot of information there. Gerard, the lawyer. So what did you think? He did say that he's declassifying a lot of information. And I think the White House website crashed as a lot of us were logging on to try to find those documents. It'll be very interesting to see what they actually say. The allegations and the concerns raised by President Trump this evening were very serious. And they really do speak to the need to get to the bottom of what's been happening with whether it has been compromised, the extent to which it's been compromised, but more importantly, how to fix it to ensure that voting integrity is maintained in future elections. Definitely a lot to get to. Marlee, thanks for joining us and your big takeaways after that speech. Well, I'm just so relieved to hear the president say all these things that I've known for years. I remember on June 27th, 2022, the day of the Republican gubernatorial primary here in New York. And the day before, the 28th was the primary. The 27th, I was in Albany with the New York State Police Special Investigations Unit giving a presentation on the presence of illegal algorithms embedded in New York's statewide voter list. And I remember that major, what an incredible patriot, Scott Dahn. And they thought we were going to be there for five minutes. Three hours later, he looked at me and he said, this is treason. And those were his words, not mine. And it is such a relief to hear the leader of the free world come out in public and say this system is truly broken. Something that many, many Americans have been arguing for years and have been suppressed. And Gerard, of course, a big focus tonight in that speech was communist China, all the different ways that communist China didn't want to see President Trump reelected. President Trump's saying because he knows them and understands what they're up to. Of course, also the voting machines, vulnerabilities there, voter rolls, all of these different things. In terms of evidence, what was strongest, do you think? Well, I think we need to see the documents that are strongest. I think it also is incumbent to analyze that data to see the parts that China allegedly bought versus hacked or accessed. Because there's a difference between voter information that can be openly purchased on the market that anyone has access to versus things that were hacked or stolen, which raises much bigger national security questions. So I think that what I'm looking for is to see precisely what it is, the actions that the Chinese government took to look at that and to see what they did with it. These allegations are more serious when you have crimes that are involved, more than just influence. And it will also be interesting to see what the next steps are. Not just diplomatic outrage to China, but whether there will be investigations of potential prosecutions of people in the United States who acted as agents of the Chinese Communist government without registering and without permission. The president did lay out a lot of action items, if you will. There are a lot to get into. In terms of election integrity and securing voter rolls, Marlee, I know you're working a lot in terms of New York efforts that way. Talk to us about what you've seen so far. Well, yeah, I work in New York specifically, but I've also worked in 32 other states. And in 2024, I filed federal lawsuits in 10 different states. But at the moment, I can say yesterday, I actually met with federal law enforcement investigators and prosecutors to present evidence that 7% of the voters in Mamdani's election don't exist. So when the president just said, hey, we have evidence of voters who don't exist, I thought, well, yeah, heck, I was just bringing them to these guys yesterday. I was just bringing them lists of them and lists of voters who have 800 series social security numbers, which are pseudo numbers that are prohibited from use. So just to get back to really what the president said, I mean, this vulnerability to China is something that we've known about since Greg and Catherine, Catherine Engelbrecht and Greg Phillips, they hosted their event, The Pit, which Epoch was at, I also presented at. And it was really about what had taken place, what they had discovered and how the investigation had turned on them. And then they ended up in federal prison. And of course, Eugene Yu ended up with a $5 million payout from the LA County government. So again, what a huge relief to hear the president get up in front of the American people and in front of the world and speak the truth. And it's like, we could talk about it more, but actually this country is the only country that can fix this problem. And it has to do with our constitution. So we have a really special and unique opportunity here to do this. I want to dig into that China element. As president laid out, the CCP had access to 220 million American voter files. And in terms of say, influencing how they might feel in terms of different topics, candidates going into the various elections, with that level of influence, how are you reading that, Gerard, and how that could have impacted our democracy? Well, look, I think that when we're looking at what China did or what anyone can do, there are two risks. One is the physical infrastructure. One is manipulating votes or registering people to vote who shouldn't be registered to vote. That's a hard question, but that's something that is more about science, more about procedure. The bigger issue, I think, is the influence one. When you have information on voters, when you have personal information, personal data on 220 million voters, you can tailor an influence operation, whether it's through TikTok, through media, through influencers, through elected officials to convey certain messages, to swing those voters, to get them to vote or to think in a certain way. We see this with polls that were released today, that now people in other countries have a favorable impression of China. That same influence operation is easily at work within the United States, and that is the danger when you have 220 million voter records that are compromised. There has been a lot of separate reporting, to your point, on different troll farms, I think they're called, where in terms of influence campaigns, whether that's on Facebook or X, have taken down a lot of accounts where they tune into those hot-button topics, whether it's abortion, maybe pro-Second Amendment in some instances, and then they just amplify that, accounts that look and sound American but aren't when you actually look at, you know, where they're chasing from. Sometimes it's Russia, China was a big hotbed for them. In terms of that influence, though, back to you, Marlee, what are some of the ways you see states combating that now, given what the president just laid out and some of those action items he also laid out? Well, that's an interesting question. I would say that mostly what I've experienced in my work trying to find common ground with election officials has been just pushback and suppression, including a two-year criminal investigation under the Ku Klux Klan Act that my first organization, New York Citizens Audit, was subjected to. We found out we were under investigation by reading it on the cover of Newsday and the Times Union, you know, didn't even have the courtesy of an email for the subpoena in advance of the media release. So an incredible show of collusion there, which is now a civil rights lawsuit in the Northern District. But, you know, in terms of election officials or states seeking to help to clarify these issues, let's just really hope that that's what starts to happen now that the cat is fully out of the bag. Definitely a lot more to get to, Gerard and Marlee. Thanks for being here in studio. We'll get back to you very quickly. Joining us now, online, is Trey Trainor, partner of Dillon Law Group Incorporation and former commissioner of U.S. Federal Election Commission. Trey, thank you so much for joining us. Now, your expertise is on election law. What was your biggest takeaway from the president's speech? Well, the biggest takeaway that I see is that we now know that there are 220 million voter files that have been compromised in the country. And we have seen the Chinese Communist Party engage in this activity in the United States. As the president outlined tonight, we've seen them do this same activity across Europe, most specifically in the Romanian election for their president, which ultimately ended up in having to have a second round of elections because of the influence that they had there. And then the president outlined the activity that they've engaged in most recently in Venezuela. So at the end of the day, the Chinese Communist Party is committed to this type of activity, both here in the United States and around the world, and is only going to stop this type of activity if the United States intends to fight back. And the only thing that we have to be able to fight back with right now is the passage of the Save America Act. Now, the president outlined a lot of action items, including informing states of non-citizens on their voter rolls. Do you expect to see quick action on that or pushback from some states or maybe a mix? I think that you'll see pushback from almost all of the states in that effort. Even the red states have been slow to act on this type of activity. We saw yesterday that the Department of Justice has had to engage in a lawsuit with the state of California for them to take people off voting rolls that have already been identified as non-citizens. And so when you get to the level of having to sue and go through the legal process which could ultimately take years, that is not a process that lends itself to a safe and secure election with us having the midterms coming up. And Trey, the president said the DHS found more than a quarter million non-citizens on voter rolls, but not whether they voted or swayed election results. NTD is still in the process of reviewing these files. What was your reaction, though, to this figure and how significant is this? Well, it's a significant figure. And the fact that non-citizens are voting in our elections, for every non-citizen that votes, it takes away the vote of a legitimate American citizen who should have their vote counted and under the Constitution has that right. And so we are depriving American citizens of a constitutional right with every illegal person that we allow to vote. Whether they're here in the country legally or illegally is irrelevant. It's whether or not they should be allowed to vote. And if they're not a citizen of the United States, they shouldn't be allowed to vote. And we've got to do more to protect the rights of US citizens. And President Trump also said much of the intelligence about China was deliberately kept from him. What do you make of this and what does this say about the intelligence community? Well, having worked twice in this administration, I am absolutely flabbergasted that elements that are an important briefing element in the presidential daily briefing were kept. And I am encouraged to see that the president has asked all of the apparatuses of justice to investigate that and see whether or not there's criminal activity that took place. Because those people willingly participated in an effort of the Chinese Communist Party to undermine the government. Now, they may not have known that they were actually working in conjunction with the Chinese, so I don't want to go so far as to say that it's treason at this point. But the activity of withholding from the president elements that are required to be in the presidential daily briefing for me is just unfathomable. And on that note, do you expect to see charges related to this come down soon? Absolutely, I do. I mean, at the end of the day, I don't think the president would go so far as to refer these things for an investigation if there wasn't some indication of wrongdoing and for us to see some sort of grand jury indictments to come out very quickly. Well, Trey, Traynor, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Absolutely, thank you for having me. Let's bring it back in studio here where I have Gerard and Marlee with me. A lot covered there. I want to focus on China. We're getting some of the declassified info here on the desk. We're going to have hot reactions here. Gerard, I want to go back to that because there was a lot of focus on that in, of course, the president's speech. There's been some reporting previously. I know Just the News did that. Katherine Herridge, who used to be with CBS, has been covering that as well. She was talking to someone back in April about that, and Just the News was covering that earlier this year. Some of that was either declassified or just open source information about some of that, that that intelligence was buried. Some of the language coming out was that people in the administration at the time didn't want that information coming out because they saw that being beneficial to President Trump and his policies against China. What do you make of that and what that says about our nation and how we can counter China if that's playing out? Well, we shouldn't be having partisan differences when it comes to countering an adversary of the United States. And we have seen elected officials on both sides of the aisle appropriately addressing the challenges that China raises. What's concerning here is that the allegation, the assertion that there were people operating within the deep state in the intelligence community, that these people were motivated by their own actions. They were not motivated by partisan gain necessarily, but they were looking to influence what the United States government responded to these challenges by withholding information. And those are serious charges. These are people who need to be rooted out, identified, and dealt with appropriately, and there are consequences for doing that, especially if they are withholding information or manipulating information. So I think these are very serious allegations that will warrant further investigation. The other thing to quickly point out, though, is when you're looking at Chinese influence, you're looking at the documents that have started being declassified and released, we're talking about something separate than the SAVE Act. You are looking at the need to pass meaningful legislation to address foreign influence. We saw allegations of it with Russia, not just with China. So this really is a much bigger issue than what we're seeing tonight. And Marlee, on that note, the president also said he's exposing all of this to make elections more secure, not to undermine confidence. Do you think he succeeded with his speech tonight? I think that the people who elected him are really happy about this presentation this evening. And, you know, I have a kind of a perspective on this question about China and intelligence and all of these things. Now, I'm not obviously privy to the classified information he was looking at. We can start looking at it now, thanks to his bravery. But when we identified with New York Citizens Audit the algorithms embedded into Nice Voter, we identified that those had been programmed in on June 15th of 2007. And, you know, we had top analysts working as a team, and we were able to pinpoint their entry into the systems. And I think around that time, I came to the realization that we were never going to know exactly what happened. And so instead, and this is where we really, I believe that this is a very important point of focus for the American people, and hopefully for the administration. We have a beautiful opportunity. Okay, the founders did not leave us the right to vote. The second sentence of the United States Constitution gives us the right to choose Congress. And the states are required, in order so that the people may choose, they're required to qualify every voter in those elections according to state statute. Now, I have been in these engagements with the New York State Board of Elections for years, and I will tell you, they qualify voters by magic wand. That's what they do. And I have their documents. You can read them on the New York Citizens Audit website. They're fascinating. I mean, they're just a study in the election administrative state arrogance. But you see, even with all of this intrigue and all this that must be unpacked within the intelligence agencies, at the moment, we can pinpoint that because our founders were so committed to the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we don't just have the right to cast a ballot. We have the right to choose Congress. And that means that the states are required to prove to us that that's what happened. Otherwise, they have usurped the right. So everything about our election systems must be transparent. Whatever machine systems are going to be used, we have to be able to see the code. We have to know every single part of that process in order to know that we chose. Thank you, James Madison. It's a beautiful note right there. We will get back to this conversation. Joining us right now with the latest, though, is Mari Otsu, NTD's White House correspondent. Mari, thank you for joining us. Great to see you again. What were, say, the five main areas of concern that the President covered in his primetime speech tonight? Hey, Tiff. Good evening to you. Nice to see you again, too. Yeah, some bombshell of findings that are just revealed by President Trump, the White House releasing those documents that cover five major areas of concern. They're right now on whitehouse.gov, published a series of these previously classified U.S. intelligence community assessments and other reports there showing mass compromise of U.S. voter data by the Chinese Communist Party. The first area of concern that President Trump raised there was the acquisition by the Chinese regime of 220 million U.S. voter files, which includes the names, the addresses, the phone numbers, party preferences, and other registration-relevant data. President Trump describing that as the largest election data compromise in history. Take a look. We fought like hell not to have a Donald Trump to 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 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? And yet, President Trump also says that the CCP's meddling itself was really only the beginning of the problem. He says that the U.S. intelligence community also helped to cover up the CCP's meddling, calling attention to elements of what he calls the deep state in U.S. intelligence agencies. He says that they suppressed and downplayed evidence of the Chinese regime's election interference by withholding key information from the president and from Congress, and that this wasn't just limited actually to those in the government, but also journalists and big American companies. Take a look. 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 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, charge 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. And if it didn't stop there, President Trump was also highlighting then vulnerabilities in America's election infrastructure, particularly in their voting machines. The president said that U.S. adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are capable of compromising U.S. election results. He cited their particular concern about centralized election data repositories, as well as electronic voting and ballot counting machines. The president said that those systems are, quote, extremely exposed to attack. And finally, he's also announcing that a Department of Homeland Security review found that nearly 280,000 non-citizens were registered to vote. But the president also adds that that true number is probably much higher and that U.S. election systems remain structurally vulnerable. Now, the president then wrapped up his speech by demanding passage of the Save America Act, which would require both photo ID and proof of citizenship to vote. Back to you. All right, Mari, thank you. And joining us now is Curtis T. Hill Jr., former attorney general of Indiana and senior advisor to the Free Enterprise Project. Curtis, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you tonight. What do you think was the most consequential part of what the president revealed tonight? Well, it should be no surprise that China is after us. I think what's surprising is that the president came out and very forcefully pointed the finger at China. Now we get to see evidence. What I'm impressed about as a former prosecutor is what's going to be a part of those declassified files. What are we going to learn? Not just about China and their efforts to interfere with our elections, but I'm very interested in understanding the depth of the intelligence level of withholding information from the president, from Congress. That certainly speaks of several felony offenses, and it'll be interesting to see what that information lays out. And Curtis, the president highlighted a lot of specific issues such as non-citizens or deceased people found on voter rolls. But will meaningful action be in the hands of individual states in some cases? Well, the states are primarily responsible for elections, and we need to coordinate between the state and the federal to make sure that we clean this information up. It's no surprise that there are opportunities to cheat, and there's no shortage of individuals, particularly on the left, who are interested in doing just that. What this does is puts everyone on notice that information that's been covered up by our own intelligence community is now out there. It's been declassified. The average person can go onto the whitehouse.gov and see for themselves what the evidence says. So it's not just the president making assertions. He's putting his money where his mouth is and backing it up with evidence. And on that note, Curtis, what do you make of the scale of tonight's announcement? Well, it's huge. It's huge to come out and forcefully make accusations against a foreign government about their interference and to back it up with clear evidence and also a tie-in to our own local or national intelligence community is incredibly significant. So much the reason why we have to go forward with the SAVE Act, we need to do as much as we can to reasonably protect our elections. And voter ID is a simple measure, but for whatever reason, our Congress can't seem to get it right. This is great information and insight coming from the president on exactly why we need stronger election integrity. And in terms of foreign influence, what could China do with that voter roll information? Oh, China could wreak all sorts of havoc and probably has. That information is incredibly valuable to our foreign adversaries. And my question is, what do we do about it? I don't want to see China simply get away with screwing around with our elections and pay no consequence. We really have to take a hard, long look at what the significance of this interruption or interference by China has on American integrity going forward. And we need to take action against China. And Curtis, what do you make of major networks choosing not to carry the president's speech? Absolutely ridiculous. It demonstrates a clear bias on the mainstream media to suggest that they know better than the White House. I think this particular press conference was necessary. It's backed up by evidence. It's not the president just coming up with an assertion. He declassified information. That's a huge newsworthy event. Declassifying information is enormous. For the major networks to miss that opportunity, to display that to their viewers is an absolute travesty. And Curtis, what can we expect from the president and Republicans after this? Well, I think you can expect the president to continue with his crusade for stronger election integrity. And hopefully this will wake Congress up. Hopefully this will be the impetus that the Senate needs to move forward with the SAVE Act as just the first step. And I would also like to see a full, fair investigation of all the parties in the intelligence community that are responsible or engaged in or involved in the cover-up of the Chinese busyness. Well, Curtis Hill Jr., thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you. And back with me at the table, Gerard Fillitty, political strategist and attorney, and Marlee Hornick, political strategist and founder of RealAmerica.Vote. Great to have you back in studio with us. Gerard, I want to start with you because there is a lot of focus, of course, on China tonight. I want to dig into that a bit because President Trump obviously has known about this for quite some time. He does continue to call President, I should say, China's leader, Xi, a friend. What do you make of that and how the relationship could change after tonight? Friends don't try to have their friends removed from power. So I think that we may very well see a change in that relationship and a stronger American response, including potentially the use of tariffs and other tools in the diplomatic arena and economic arena to put pressure on China to address this behavior. But ultimately what I think is we see the emphasis on the SAVE Act, the Save America Act, but that's only one pillar. What people will be talking about tomorrow will be the MEGA Act, will be about other legislation that's necessary to address Chinese potential interference in the mechanics of the election. And I think that is one of the big things that we're going to see coming out of this, that it's not just about how people are registered to vote, but it's also the voting machines, the integrity of the physical process. And in terms of responding to China, I think that President Trump will do so forcefully. We needed to have this evidence. We needed a declassification procedure, which takes time. But now that the documents are released, then people can analyze them and we will have a forceful diplomatic response. And do you expect China to react to the speech? I think they will ignore it. I don't expect them to say anything. I don't expect them to admit anything. I think that they will deny ever doing anything wrong. But at the end of the day, we do know that China is very much involved in influence operations around the world to its benefit. And Marlee, in terms of the Save America Act, do you think after tonight's speech, the Senate can not pass it at this stage? Oh, I don't think you'll see any change in behavior from Chuck Schumer. I just I don't think you're going to see an inch of change on the Democrat side. I think the Democrats are heavily invested in fraud. I hate to say it, but that's my belief at this point after five years of working on this issue and all of the litigation and investigations I've been involved in. So I don't think that's going to be an easy lift. Again, that's probably I think that the work that RealAmerica.Vote has done and the evidence that I brought to the FBI and prosecutors yesterday is actually essential. It's essential for enforcing the Composition Clause, Article 1, Section 2. Because you see, if we can prove that the states have failed to qualify voters, those are not clerical errors and they're not oversights and they're not material errors. Those are constitutional violations of a principle that was so essential to the American founding that we find it at the very top of the Constitution. And, you know, the Constitution wasn't written in word. It was written with a quill pen. So when they put that pen down on parchment, they were very deliberate about the order of things. And that that had to come first tells us, or it should tell us, that you cannot have the American Republic without legitimate representative government. You can't have it without qualification of voters. And that is a Republican form of government. And Gerard, following tonight's speech, what are the biggest areas of changes you're expecting or would like to see? Well, passage of the Save America Act, for starters. But I also want to see legislation that more directly addresses interference in elections, registration requirements, investigations that go into the mechanisms that the CCP and other foreign countries use in these influence operations that they need to be explicitly addressed. So it's not just about the registering people to vote. It's about the mechanics of the election. What do we do about voting machines? What do we do about voting records? These are things that Congress needs to take up beyond the Save America Act. So as Justin said before, this is the Save Act is a first step, but there's more that needs to come and quickly. And Marlee, in terms of the major networks that didn't air this speech, some of them saying they wouldn't like what the president would say tonight. Now, a big part or big strategy of the president has been speaking directly to the American people. How do you think that message of what he was delivering tonight will reach those people? Well, I hate to say it, but I think they're going to hear a very tailored message, which is what we've been seeing for years and has been so frustrating not only for the president, but for so many Americans who we have dear family members that were estranged. Families, communities, neighbors have become estranged because of the deception in some of the media. And it's unfortunate, but I don't think that we're going to see that let up just because he made this presentation. I do want to speak to something that Gerard was talking about with the equipment for election administration. And again, in my journey, I've had the opportunity to attend several of the secretaries of state conferences and to see kind of from their perspective, how this system is working and how it helps them. I think, again, it's important to have investigations and it's important to get all of the IT people together and come up with the best strategy. But at the end of the day, we need a system that upholds our due process right. When we don't know how the votes were counted, we don't know if we chose. So if they can't tell us how the votes are being counted, then it's not an election. And, you know, I speak about this because, you know, for especially for New Yorkers, you may remember when New York Citizens Out, it used to have signs literally all over the state in yards because we had thousands of volunteers that I had trained to do this work together that said 338,000 more votes than voters because that's what they counted in the 2020 election in New York. They counted 338 votes with no associated voter history record in their official documents. How is that an election? Where did those votes come from? So, again, like I get it with the election technology. I get it with the frustrations. But we shouldn't even be having that conversation in America. And then the beautiful thing, Tiffany, is that once we fix it here, then everyone will understand how compromised these systems were and it can be done everywhere. Hence the focus on election integrity tonight. Thank you both so much for being here with us and thank you for tuning in to tonight's special coverage of President Trump's address to the nation. I'm Tiffany Meyer and good night.