President Donald Trump’s July 16 nationally televised address painted a dark picture of American elections being undermined by elements of the U.S. intelligence community and the cover-up by those activities to ensure neither he nor the American public knew what was happening.

Trump also unclassified and made public multiple highly incriminating documents in which key figures from the Obama and first Trump-era intelligence community themselves describe in great detail exactly how they conducted these criminal activities and even boasted about their successful cover-ups.

In perhaps the most stunning example, Nikki Floris, a former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, told a colleague in an internal email, “I am basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”

Floris is also prominent in FBI documents made public before Trump’s address by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) concerning evidence produced by the FBI’s Albany, NY, field office that “the Chinese government was producing ‘tens of thousands’ of fraudulent drivers’ licenses to manufacture mail-in votes for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election.”

According to Grassley, the report was never fully investigated “due to the FBI’s sudden and ‘abnormal’ decision to halt the investigation and bury the [Information Intelligence Report] IIR’s existence, preventing any additional FBI field offices, as well as other Intelligence Community elements, from accessing or studying the document.”

The reaction of major media outlets to Trump’s address and the documents he made public was to almost instantly dismiss his claims and evidence as insufficient. An especially instructive example of that reaction is found in an Associated Press dispatch headlined “Trump says these documents prove his false claims of election fraud. Here’s what they really say.” The dispatch is nowhere labeled as a news analysis or opinion piece; it is instead presented as straight news. In fact, the dispatch is an obvious effort to discredit Trump and his claims regardless of what the documents in question contain.

“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,’ Trump said Thursday night. There is no evidence, however, that China actually used that information in any way.”

The AP writers claim there is “no evidence” that China ever used a massive acquisition of information from 220 million U.S. voter files. Those files are, according to the writers, publicly available. But their claim that Trump is wrong to accuse the Chinese of using the files in some form of voter fraud is simply an assertion for which they offer no evidence of support.

And if Trump’s explanation is incorrect, readers might reasonably expect the AP writers to provide a credible alternative explanation. Instead, they completely ignored the obvious question of why China would go to the effort to acquire those documents in the first place? Why would Beijing waste time, manpower, and money getting their hands of documents for which they had no use?

The AP story was indicative of the wider reaction among major media that Trump’s interpretation must be wrong because the voter registration information is already publicly available. The White House pointed out in response that “when China obtained similar data on British voters, the Biden Administration responded with sanctions and criminal charges. When Iran hackers obtained just 100,000 American voter files, the Biden Department of Justice brought indictments. Yet when China acquired data on 220 million Americans, these same officials stayed silent and covered it up — an indefensible double standard.”

But there was another hugely significant claim by Trump for which he indeed did not offer any evidence, either in his remarks to the nation or the documents he made public for the first time ever: “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.”

That is a profoundly serious charge because it encourages the conclusion that journalists and the tone and tenor of their “reporting” are for sale to the highest bidder, without regard to the facts about the issue or official involved. If that’s the case, then clearly the journalist is nothing more than a paid mouthpiece, otherwise known as a propagandist.

No response was received from the White House press office when this writer sought comment, including if and when specific names of the journalists involved and their employers would be released , the amounts they were paid, and what the stories were that they wrote in return for the payments.

If such information exists, then perhaps the silence of the White House press office is attributable to legal processes now underway regarding such journalists. And it is certainly possible that Trump purposely did not name names in his address to bait his multitudinous media critics to display their predictable denials — followed by familiar accusations about Trump’s mendacity — before the supporting evidence is unveiled. But the longer there is delay in providing such damning evidence, the less credible is Trump’s claim.

If, in fact, no supporting evidence is available, then Trump’s inclusion of the accusation in his July 16 remarks was wrong, and he should own up to it. Stay tuned on that score. If there is credible evidence for the allegation, however, the actions thus exposed will represent the worst damage ever inflicted on a constitutionally-protected profession.