What Trump said in primetime speech
• President Donald Trump, in a primetime speech, alleged vulnerabilities exist in American election systems, though declassified documents his administration released largely discuss vulnerabilities that have been known for years and that election officials around the country have tried to address.
• Trump said his purpose is “not to weaken confidence,” though critics say he has done just that. For years, the US president has spread falsehoods about the 2020 election. Watch CNN Explains’ episode about voter fraud and the safeguards that effectively prevent — and catch — it.
• In the address, Trump also highlighted his administration’s economic agenda and immigration policies. He also pointed to the latest inflation report, promoted his Trump Accounts initiative, and barely mentioned the war with Iran.
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Our live coverage of President Donald Trump’s primetime address from the White House on Thursday night has ended. Read more:
Here are the top lines from Trump's speech on election security
President Donald Trump gave a primetime address tonight, arguing that potential vulnerabilities exist in American election systems, just months before the midterms.
He began his remarks with stark rhetoric casting doubt on the nation’s election security, claiming it “falls catastrophically short” and sought to rally support for his stalled federal elections overhaul legislation.
The Trump administration also unveiled a trove of newly declassified documents. However, none of the new information suggests any previous election counts — including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost — were directly affected by foreign interference or fraud.
Here were the top lines from the president tonight:
- Beginning with other topics: Trump opened his address by highlighting his administration’s economic agenda and immigration policies. He pointed to the latest inflation report, promoted his Trump Accounts initiative and his prescription drug site TrumpRx, and barely mentioned the war with Iran.
- Focus on election integrity: The release of declassified documents related to election integrity is not meant to “weaken confidence” in US elections, Trump said, despite years of insisting there have been irregularities in elections. Instead, its purpose is to “earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly.”
- China voting information: Trump said China illegally acquired 220 million US voter files, including names, contact information and party preferences. He also suggested China worked to “undermine my first administration and our 2020 campaign,” and influence the 2018 midterm elections. China has repeatedly denied past allegations related to election interference.
- China wanted him to lose: Trump claimed China sought to meddle in the 2020 election to prevent him from winning, even though US intelligence agencies concluded in a report declassified in 2021 that China chose not to try to influence the outcome of the election out of fear of upsetting US-China relations. That conclusion was repeated in documents the Trump administration declassified ahead of the speech.
- Withholding compromised data: Information showing “an unprecedented election security nightmare” was not disclosed to him or Congress, Trump said. He also claimed US spy agencies knew about compromised voter registration files in 2020 and chose to keep “the information secret and hidden.”
- Non-citizen voting: Trump said his Department of Homeland Security uncovered approximately 278,000 non-citizens in state voter rolls. But the data-matching program Trump cited is known to present an inflated number of suspected non-citizens, in part because naturalized citizens are often flagged wrongly as non-citizens.
- Voter registration Michigan: The president claimed an alleged fraud scheme around voter registration in Michigan in 2020 was covered up by federal officials and asked the FBI to investigate. Michigan’s secretary of state pushed back against the “baseless” accusations and reiterated that the state’s elections are secure.
- Briefing tomorrow: Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin will hold a briefing tomorrow “to outline his department’s recent work confirming cyber vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems,” Trump said.
CNN’s Alejandra Jaramillo, Adam Cancryn, Betsy Klein, Molly English, Donald Judd, Tori B. Powell, Tierney Sneed, Simone McCarthy, Fredreka Schouten and Holmes Lybrand contributed reporting to this post.
Nevada, Pennsylvania push back on Trump claims about noncitizens on their voter rolls
In his primetime address, President Donald Trump claimed the Department of Homeland Security, reviewing public data, found roughly 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote across four states: California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania. It is unclear what data DHS analyzed to support that claim.
Nevada’s secretary of state’s office flatly rejected the assertion that thousands of noncitizens are on its voter rolls.
Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt raised similar questions in a statement to CNN, saying, “We welcome DHS sharing their methodology and list of potential ineligible voters so we can carefully review the validity of their claims.”
CNN reached out to DHS asking what voter data it reviewed from the four states, but the department did not immediately respond. The Justice Department is currently suing more than two dozen states to force them to turn over their full, unredacted voter rolls for screening through a DHS citizenship verification system, though courts have repeatedly blocked those efforts.
CNN has reached out to election officials in California and New Jersey.
Democratic governors say Trump is trying to 'undermine free and fair elections'
Twenty four Democratic governors accused President Donald Trump of attempting to undermine elections, saying they “stand ready to fight back against the Trump administration and stop any and all unlawful attacks on every American’s constitutional right to vote.”
“It’s deeply alarming that President Trump continues to try to undermine free and fair elections,” the governors said in a statement responding to Trump’s remarks that was posted to the Democratic Governors Association website.
The governors issuing the statement include: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Their comments come as states face increased pressure from the Trump administration to adopt a sweeping set of election changes championed by the president.
Last month, CNN reported that the administration is threatening to withhold tens of millions of dollars in federal homeland security funds unless states take steps that include including phasing out certain electronic voting systems and moving to hand-marked paper ballots, among other changes.
China denies Trump’s allegations of election meddling
China denied President Donald Trump’s accusations that it aimed to influence US elections and had obtained tens of millions of US voter data records.
In a statement to CNN Thursday, a spokesperson at the Chinese embassy to the US in Washington said: “China has all along adhered to the principle of non-interference in others’ internal affairs. The US election is an internal matter of the US. Its outcome is determined by the votes of the American people.”
Beijing has repeatedly denied past allegations related to election interference and political meddling from a number of Western nations, including Australia, Canada and Britain, as well as the US.
CNN has also reached out to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment on the allegations.
CIA director praises Trump administration declassification
CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Thursday highlighted his department’s role in the Trump administration’s declassification of election-related documents this evening, saying the effort was meant to uphold “public confidence in elections.”
Critics say the declassification and President Donald Trump’s primetime speech could have the opposite effect, undercutting public faith in the electoral process.
“Protecting our democracy and the integrity of our elections from foreign influence and interference remains paramount,” Ratcliffe said in a post on X, adding, “These matters deserve public scrutiny to ensure our democracy’s foundation – the security and public confidence in our elections – is unassailable.”
The CIA was one of several agencies involved in the White House release of documents.
Ratcliffe was Trump’s director of national intelligence in his first term – when the intelligence community took a different position than what Trump described tonight. In 2021, an intelligence report released by the ODNI concluded that “we have no indication that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 election, including voter registrations, casting ballots, vote tabulation or reporting results.”
Prominent 2020 election deniers praise Trump address
Some of the most prominent proponents of conspiracy theories falsely alleging the 2020 election was rigged welcomed President Donald Trump’s declassification of election-related documents Thursday night.
On his live webcast, conservative firebrand Steve Bannon described Trump’s address to the nation as “incredibly powerful” and immediately began using it to sow doubts about the integrity of the upcoming midterm elections — even though Trump claimed that was not his intention.
He added further on his live program, “The midterms are going to be stolen like every other election has been stolen.”
Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who infamously held a “cyber symposium” in 2021 that failed to deliver on its promise of proving the 2020 election was stolen, also welcomed Trump’s release of declassified documents.
Michael Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s first national security adviser in 2017, wrote on X after the address that “the CIA and NSA directors during his first term should immediately be arrested for treason.”
Declassified documents shed light on scope of Chinese hacking targeting Americans
Documents that the Trump administration released on Thursday shed new light on just how voracious Chinese intelligence services have been in collecting information on Americans.
Cyber espionage, or the use of hacking to collect sensitive information, and the use of cyberattacks to disrupt elections are two very different things. The documents show China doing the former, not the latter.
The documents show the lengths that Chinese hackers allegedly went to spy on senior US government officials and the 2020 presidential campaign of Joe Biden.
One Chinese hacking group was using techniques to track the email accounts of Biden campaign staffers, suggesting that “the Chinese operators are mapping out the target network for follow-on approaches, possibly including tasking campaign staffers’ e-mail accounts in the Chinese military’s signals intelligence system for collection,” one declassified intelligence report says.
Other reports in the collection of documents note that Chinese government actors have been downloading voter registration information in numerous states. In some cases, the information was already publicly available. But there is no mention of China actively exploiting the data on voters it collected or stole. There is instead intelligence analysis of what China could do with the data.
The personal information on Americans taken by one Chinese actor “could, in theory, be leveraged to carry out anything from future CNE (computer network exploitation) operations to election influence operations, although the actual motivations for collecting this information is unknown,” one intelligence report said.
The documents paint a picture of Chinese intelligence services that are collecting just about any information they can on hundreds of millions of Americans. That, in the aggregate, is not a new revelation. Between the 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management and subsequent hacks of American health care providers and other companies, US intelligence officials have long warned that Chinese spies have a detailed picture of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of Americans.
Trump's claim Venezuela hacked voting machines echoes allegations from an ex-Venezuelan spy
The claim promoted by the White House tonight that Venezuela experimented with hacking its own voting machines echoes allegations made by former Venezuelan intelligence chief and convicted drug trafficker Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal in a letter to President Donald Trump.
Carvajal, a three-star general trusted by former Venezuelan leaders Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, led the country’s military intelligence service and later served in the National Assembly. He eventually broke with Maduro, endorsed opposition leader Juan Guaidó and fled to Spain.
He was arrested there in 2021 and extradited to the United States in 2023.
Carvajal claimed elections “can be rigged with the software” and that it had been used to do so, but did not specify which elections.
Smartmatic rejected Carvajal’s account, saying it was never owned or controlled by the Venezuelan government and that no evidence showed its technology manipulated US elections.
The company says its technology was used only in Los Angeles County during the 2020 election.
Carvajal pleaded guilty in 2025 to narcoterrorism, drug-trafficking and weapons charges, including conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
His sentencing has been postponed without a new date — a possible sign he may be cooperating with prosecutors, although no agreement has been confirmed. He could become a witness against Nicolás Maduro, who was captured by US forces and brought to New York to face narcoterrorism, cocaine-importation and weapons charges.
Maduro has pleaded not guilty.
Sen. Chris Coons says he “heard nothing new” from Trump’s address
Democratic Sen. Chris Coons told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he heard very little new in President Donald Trump’s primetime address, predicting that it would do little to help pass Trump’s controversial elections bill.
Coons took aim at Trump’s assertion that China had interfered in the 2020 election, which Trump lost.
Election community relieved that Trump didn’t take any drastic steps Thursday
Some election officials privately expressed relief Thursday night that President Donald Trump didn’t announce any new major or dramatic steps that would upend voting procedures.
In the run-up to his primetime address, rumors swirled throughout the election community about possible worst-case scenarios and unilateral actions Trump could take — like declaring a national emergency or trying to decertify voting machines.
Instead, his roughly 30-minute speech featured recycled complaints and debunked talking points about voter fraud, new material from unclassified documents, and a push for Congress to pass his controversial voting overhaul known as the Save America Act.
But another person in the election community said, despite the temporary easing of anxiety, there are still plenty of concerns going forward. If Trump raised these supposed new election vulnerabilities, “when will he announce his corrective measures?” they said.
Some major election vendors reacted more cautiously.
Dominion’s machines are used in more than half of US states. Trump and his allies have repeatedly and falsely accused Dominion of rigging the 2020 election.
It’s too late for Trump’s elections overhaul, state officials of both parties warn
President Donald Trump’s speech Thursday is unlikely to affect the legislative hurdles blocking the SAVE America Act, the sweeping elections legislation he’s championed that would impose strict voter ID mandates nationwide and require proof of citizenship be provided when registering to vote.
But election officials warn that, even if it were enacted, implementation with a general election just three-and-a-half months away would cause major disruptions. The current version of the bill would put its requirements into effect immediately.
He said that elections in his state are carried out by 30,000 workers known as election judges. “They would all have to be trained about how to spot a real versus a fake birth certificate or a real versus a fake marriage record,” Simon, a Democrat, told CNN Thursday morning, referring to the workaround in the bill for married voters who have different names than what’s on their birth certificates.
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, told CNN this week that even though Iowa already has some of the bill’s requirements at the state level, other provisions would be new. He said that “Congress has failed miserably by not coming to the experts to make sure [the federal bill] can even be implemented.”
Michigan secretary of state blasts Trump's claims of voter fraud, says elections remain "secure and safe"
Michigan’s secretary of state on Thursday accused President Donald Trump of sowing doubt in the nation’s electoral system, insisting that the state’s elections were “secure and safe” in 2020 and all subsequent elections.
The statement by Jocelyn Benson, who is also running for governor as a Democrat, came after Trump invoked Michigan in his primetime speech, claiming that evidence of voter fraud in 2020 had “been buried and covered up.”
Benson dismissed Trump’s remarks as “long debunked and baseless conspiracy theories about an election he lost almost six years ago,” adding that “none of his rhetoric changes what’s true: Michigan’s elections are secure and safe and the results are an accurate reflection of the will of the people.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel also rejected Trump’s claims in a separate statement, vowing to resist any effort by the Justice Department to interfere with state or local administration of elections.
Trump’s allegations threaten to upend US-China ties at sensitive moment
President Donald Trump’s claim that China has waged a campaign of interference in US elections threatens to upset a fragile stability between the two powers ahead of an expected visit by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to the US in September.
Beijing has long bristled at – and strongly denied – allegations of political or election inference raised by the US and its allies. It says such activities contradict China’s principle of “non-interference” in other countries’ internal affairs.
China has also repeatedly slammed the US for what it says is Washington’s meddling in other countries’ business.
Trump’s latest allegations are likely to cast a shadow over Beijing’s preparations for Xi’s upcoming trip – expected to be the next key touchpoint in an effort to strengthen fraught ties between the world’s two largest economies.
Relations cratered last year due to spiraling disagreements over trade, tariffs and export controls on key strategic goods. An even keel had only been restored following a Trump-Xi meeting in South Korea last fall, and then a landmark visit by Trump to Beijing in May, the first by an American president in nine years.
There, the two sides hailed an era of “constructive strategic stability,” and Trump invited Xi to the US in September. Beijing confirmed in May that Xi would make a fall visit to the US.
Cabinet officials, campaign staff and White House aides on hand for Trump’s speech
When President Donald Trump delivered election security remarks from the East Room Thursday, he was joined by members of his Cabinet, White House officials, and members of his political operation.
Former journalist and special government employee John Solomon, who’s been tasked with leading White House “transparency” efforts was also seated in the front row holding a binder.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, FBI Director Kash Patel, acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte were also on hand.
Trump aide Peter Navarro — who served a four-month sentence after defying a federal subpoena from the House Select Committee that investigated the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol was also present in the East Room as was Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller.
And a number of aides, including White House comms director Stephen Cheung, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and aide Natlie Harp were also present.
As it happened: CNN's live analysis of Trump's primetime speech
CNN experts provided live analysis and context on President Donald Trump’s primetime speech, during which he claimed declassified documents show US election vulnerabilities. Read our live analysis as it happened.
Trump announces declassification of "vulnerabilities" in US election infrastructure
President Donald Trump announced he is declassifying critical intelligence revealing vulnerabilities in the US election infrastructure.
During his remarks tonight from the White House, Trump claimed the evidence shows how dangerous the nation’s current election system is, alleging it exposes high levels of hacking “never thought possible” by foreign interference.
Trump directs FBI to investigate alleged voter registration fraud in Michigan
President Donald Trump claimed tonight that an alleged fraud scheme around voter registration in Michigan in 2020 was covered up by federal officials.
The investigation stemmed from earlier probes into thousands of fraudulently filled out voter registration cards by people paid to get others to register to vote in Muskegon County, Michigan.
State and federal investigators uncovered evidence that Democratic canvassers in Muskegon, Michigan were paid to collect filled out registration cards but instead put in fake names and information. The fraudulent voter registration cards were flagged by the county’s clerk and, the documents released in support of the president’s claim note, did not result in any fraudulent votes being cast.
State and federal prosecutors declined to prosecute anyone following the investigations, despite criticism from Republican state lawmakers.
Trump said he is asking the FBI director to work with the Department of Justice to “prosecute those responsible for any crimes.”
Michigan officials denied what they called “baseless accusations” that the state’s elections are not secure, and pushed back against “DOJ’s intention to deploy federal election monitors to various polling locations during the August primary election.”
The post was updated with a response from Michigan officials.
Trump barely mentioned the Iran conflict in wartime, primetime address
President Donald Trump sought a rare primetime address in wartime to speak directly to the American people, but he did not use the opportunity to clearly lay out his case for a path forward for the conflict in Iran that has escalated in recent days.
In fact, he barely mentioned the war.
The United States, he added, is “winning big in Iran, and you will see the fruits of that labor very, very shortly.”
That was the president’s only reference to the conflict, as strikes have intensified throughout the week following the total breakdown of a ceasefire agreement.
The US military said Thursday it launched a wave of airstrikes for the sixth consecutive night, and CNN has reported that Trump is now receiving options for expanding the US military operation in Iran as he weighs next steps.
But Americans are skeptical of Trump’s strategy, with gas prices and the cost of living ticking up at home. A new Washington Post-Ipsos poll released Thursday reveals that just 29% of Americans approve of the president’s handling of the Iran conflict.
Trump: "Voters' data in 18 states have been bought, stolen, or hacked by China"
President Donald Trump said tonight that US spy agencies in 2020 began learning about “10s of millions of voters’ data in 18 states have been bought, stolen, or hacked by China.”
Voter registration files, according to the White House, were purchased illicitly, stolen, hacked, or otherwise illegally obtained by China. (Many states openly and non-controversially sell versions of their voter data, but only the part that contains public information.)
A foreign adversary can learn a lot about Americans from accessing US voter rolls. And it creates a real possibility of chaos on Election Day, if the foreign actor somehow accesses live databases and starts manipulating entries. But the US has never accused China of tainting or deleting voter records.
