In a primetime address to the nation Thursday night, President Donald Trump revealed major election infrastructure vulnerabilities in the U.S., which have allowed foreign actors to exploit and manipulate American elections for years.

“Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” the president announced. “This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes [American elections 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, our beautiful, our great American people. But that all changes right now.”

The president cited information compiled by the White House Government Transparency Task Force and top intelligence officials. “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,” the president affirmed. He shared five key findings from the review of years’ worth of election infrastructure data.

First, the president shared that the People’s Republic of China (PRC), led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), conducted “what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history” in the 2020 election, illegally obtaining and weaponizing an estimated 220 million U.S. voter files. The CCP was able to use this information, which included names, addresses, phone numbers, party affiliation, and other sensitive information, to register false or fictitious entities to vote and to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. “This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare,” the president commented. “The intelligence even shows that China signed a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project.”

Second, the president confirmed that senior U.S. intelligence officials — agents of the “Deep State,” as he put it — actively suppressed the information regarding China’s election interference, preventing the public and even elected U.S. leaders, including the president, from accessing or discovering the information. According to the president, U.S. intelligence agencies discovered China’s influence and interference in the 2020 election that same year, but kept the fact hidden from then-President Trump and even from Congress. Furthermore, as early as 2018, entities like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had documented instances of CCP activity inside the U.S. intended to oppose or undermine Trump’s first administration.

Citing a CIA report, the president recounted that the CCP interfered in the 2018 midterm elections in an effort to weaken Republican power in Congress, leveraged Chinese-linked businesses and business leaders to foment hostility between the private sector and the Trump White House, and hired U.S. journalists to criticize and demonize the Trump administration, including via fabricated information or unverified claims.

The president also cited the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which found that the CCP had manufactured fraudulent ballots in the 2020 election to benefit Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden. “Documents show that during this period, dozens of significant CIA and [National Security Agency (NSA)] reports about China’s election targeting were kept out of the presidential briefing,” Trump confirmed. “These were briefings I would get almost every day. Everything was kept out that was of importance.”

Furthermore, intelligence agency officials admitted in internal communications that they intentionally withheld critical election security information in order to destabilize and eventually oust the Trump administration. One FBI official described herself as running a “shadow government” in opposition to the Trump administration, while another confessed in an email that he and others had “deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election” from Trump and his staff.

The president also confirmed that numerous “burn bags” have been discovered in intelligence agencies, containing incriminating information and documents from Barack Obama’s presidency that was originally intended to be destroyed. “Maybe we got lucky,” Trump quipped. “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.”

Third, the president confirmed that U.S. intelligence and election officials knowingly and “blatantly” lied about the security of critical election infrastructure, including voting machines. “They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised, and people within our government knew that,” he shared. According to the president, numerous intelligence community assessments and various other security reports confirm that U.S. election infrastructure — chiefly voting machines, voter registration databases, and even official election websites — are vulnerable and suspect to being hacked, compromised, and manipulated by foreign actors, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and even non-state organizations and terrorist groups.

The president explained that Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro had, in fact, engaged in such activity in his own country, electronically altering vote data and election outcomes in such a manner that even thorough audits could not detect the manipulation. Trump added, “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.”

A fourth finding was that intelligence and law enforcement agencies have actively obscured and covered up evidence found of widespread voter fraud. One example that the president cited was a voter fraud ring uncovered in Michigan during the 2020 election. When Michigan State Police raided a Democratic get-out-the-vote organization, they contacted the FBI for assistance, disturbed by the evidence of large-scale fraud that they had discovered. Democrat activists involved in the scheme admitted to the FBI that they forged signatures, falsely registered ineligible or fictitious persons to vote, and were paid and paid others to register to vote, among other criminal or suspect activities. While the FBI initially concluded that numerous crimes had been committed, the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) “slow-walked the investigation” and eventually terminated it.

Finally, the president announced the publication of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) investigation which has found, so far, that nearly 300,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in U.S. elections. “The real number is actually much higher than that,” he observed, pointing out that Democrat-run states refused to comply with the investigation and did not submit voter registration data to DHS. “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,” the president asserted. “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 noncitizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls,” he expounded. “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.”

“No country can 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,” the president explained. “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,” he continued. “Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard.” He added, “This is worse than any third world country. There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.”

The president noted that mainstream media outlets like NBC News and ABC News refused to air his speech, charging major media outlets with being complicit in the election fraud. “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,” he said. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses. They use our public multibillion-dollar-in-value airways for absolutely no money, they pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting.”

Trump called on Democrats, Republicans, and Independent voters to set aside political differences and unite around securing American elections, encouraging voters to call their elected representatives in Congress and urge passage of the SAVE America Act, which would mitigate many of the election fraud vulnerabilities the president detailed and mandate photo identification to vote and proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote.

“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,” he said. “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.”