Transcription
The president never said, last night, that the election was stolen. He never said, last night, that they had stolen the election or stuffed the ballot box or anything like that.
What the president showed last night were documents that proved China ran the largest known theft of American voter data in history. 220 million files. That's your name, your address, your phone number, your party affiliation, everything. Run through a dedicated exploitation unit in Beijing. They have a whole building for this, okay?
Now, I want to give the fact checkers, you know, the first bonus point because on the nose, look at you, you can do some work. There is no evidence, none, that China reached into a voting machine and flipped a ballot or changed the outcome of 2020. But, that wasn't the charge. The media is treating this story as if that's what the claim was, but that's not the claim. The outcome was never the frightening part here.
There are two things that you need to know that were discussed last night. And I'm going to lay them out in the next 15 minutes, okay? So, just hold on with me.
First point. According to the declassified material, a hostile foreign power known as China spent years assembling a file of 220 million American voters. Names, addresses, phone numbers, party, everything. Everything. The rhythm of when you show up and when you don't go out to vote. Important information. And the response that the media is giving you today is, "Nah, most of it's public anyway. You can buy all of that stuff." Okay. All right. Well, that's true. And it is precisely the opposite thing to find comforting. Any one fact on that list is harmless. Your address is not a weapon. Your party registration is not a weapon. The weapon is the assembly. The 220 million profiles in the hands of one regime, the one regime on Earth that is already shown us in broad daylight what it does with information like that, with the algorithm. What does it do with that data? This is a country that tunes the recommendation engine on the phone in your kids' hands. By controlling what you or your family sees is power.
Now, nobody has proven they've used it that way, but that's their intent, at least according to our own intelligence back in before 2020. You know, while they were saying, "No, it's the safest election ever." You do not want to wait for a hostile power to fire the weapon before you admit it is a weapon. Why do you think we're over in Iran? We're over in Iran because they cannot What? We're just What? We're just using it nuclear material for fuel. No, you're not. This is the same argument with China. What? We're not using it for this. Oh, really? Okay, well, we'll just wait until you push that nuclear button.
If it's not the Here's the biggest thing for the media. This is information you can buy anywhere. This is no big deal. Huh. Huh, okay. All right. Let let me ask you this. CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, then why at the very moment are states all across the spectrum, red and blue alike, and you have been beating this drum for months. Why are they refusing to hand over the exact same voter data to their own federal government? Most of them told the Justice Department, "No way." The courts backed them. You've been singing the praises of these states on the grounds that that information is too sensitive, too personal, and too easily abused just to put it on the loose.
I I'm so tired of this. I really am. I mean, I'm just so tired of this game. You know, it's not a game to most of us. This is not a game. This is our country. This is our lives. You cannot make the case that the the United States government should not have the voter data from the states because it's too dangerous to give to our federal government and then in the next breath be on TV and say, "You can buy this information just about anywhere. It's really no big deal that China has it." Oh god. We're having the arg- a furious argument right now on whether Washington can be trusted with the voter file. While we're being told that Beijing holding that voter file is no big deal, it can't be both, media. Make up your mind. Either the data is dangerous or it isn't. Half the nation is in the court right now arguing that it is, AND IT'S YOUR HALF.
I'M SORRY. I DON'T want to be one of these angry guys, but every day I come in with the intent of not being one of these angry guys, and then I look at the news. You want to understand why a pile of information, ordinary facts, terrifies people who study this for a living? Don't look at hackers. Forget about the hackers. Look at East Germany. The Stasi, remembered for surveillance, the files, the informants, one in every stairwell. People would whisper in their own homes. Why? Because because you could buy this information anywhere? No, it was because it was all being compiled. Once overt arrests started drawing too much attention in East Germany, the Stasi learned to break people quietly. How did they do it? They used intimate, aggregated knowledge in all of those files to reach into a target's life and just rearrange things. You just you put a rumor with a neighbor. A marriage nudge towards collapse, a promotion that never comes for reasons that no one could ever name. The victims used they they normally didn't even know what was happening. They just thought, "I'm losing my mind." And none of it required any dramatic secret. It required knowing an ordinary person completely and just wanting to steer them. That's the capability on the table. Not that they went in and they changed the numbers of the vote.
But because China is clearly amassing a file, and let me give you let me let Let me just read it to you. From a declassified uh email. Also, mid-2018. The This is our intelligence, and never told the president any of this. China was working to influence the results of the US midterm elections and later results in the 2020 US presidential elections. As part of the campaign, China was analyzing the 2016 presidential elections and identifying US states that voted for the US president. The Chinese would then identify sectors within these states that voted to support the US president and his party. Then would attempt to make those sectors experience negative financial consequences. The Chinese hope that these measures would induce representatives from these sectors to lobby the president to be more kind to China.
But what's worse is they had all of this information where they could take it and nudge you. This is what the algorithm is. This is why I say you're going to lose free will. Because you won't know if that was your idea or if that was a nudge. And it's bad enough when I don't know if it was Google or Microsoft, but now you also have to worry that it might be China doing it. At the same time, all of a sudden we're seeing this pop this popularity with communist. You'd think that China's algorithms don't have anything to do with this? You don't think they're running an influence campaign in our own country? Of course they are. This was point number one. But that's not even the most important point. I think this is the bigger problem. Problem number two.
The people inside our own intelligence community knew this, discovered this, wrote amongst themselves about it, and then buried it while assuring us the elections were completely secure. That's not a scandal. That is a breach of trust that reaches the foundation of the republic. Okay? Nothing here, I want you to know, has been proven yet in a courtroom. But, the documents are clear. These allegations that are drawn from the documents the White House declassified and released, the allegations, this is so serious they have to be run all the way down to the ground because if they hold up in court, what they mean is terrifying. They mean the people who put their hand on the scriptures and swore to protect from all enemies, foreign and domestic, the Constitution of the United States, they decided they decided that the elected leader of the people of the free world, by extension you, that person didn't need to know that a hostile power had a map of the American electorate. That's not incompetence. So, you know, they know what that meant. It says it. They knew what they were doing and what it meant. That wasn't incompetence on the intelligence part. That was that was a decision.
Foreign adversary spy, we should always accept that. That's why we have a standing spy agency. They always have. The republic was built to survive spies. What it was never built to survive is guardians who have then said, "I'm no longer a guardian. I'm a gatekeeper of information. I get to decide what the elected president gets to see, what the people are allowed to see because I don't think they can handle it or they might react in a way I don't think they should." That constitute Our Constitution does not put the power like that into your hands. It puts it in elected hands, accountable hands, not your hands. If they can sit on a foreign adversary's grab of voter rolls, the only honest question that any of us should be asking is what won't they do? What won't they do?
We have example after example, Iran-Contra, we have Vietnam, but it's exactly the same instinct. The president doesn't need to know this. Let me ask you Democrats, did you have a problem with Iran-Contra? That was the intelligence community saying we didn't tell the president about these things. Now, you've always claimed that he did know, so the fault was really his. But what if he didn't know? And the fault was the intelligence, would it still be such a big problem? Of course it would be. Of course it would be. And that's what this is.
Here's the worst part of this. In every case we have seen like this, never this I don't think ever like this, never this big, never documented trail saying we're massa- we're massaging the presidential report. We're making sure that we're holding this back. I've never seen that before, ever, ever. Remember all all we had was What was her name? Fawn Hall that says, "Yeah, I did that." We never had documents, but we had hearings, and it eroded our faith, and there was a conviction here or there and later pardoned, later overturned, but there was no accountability for any of these things, ever, ever. The machine just took the hit and then just kept running and it's still running.
So, may [clears throat] I suggest that maybe we look at things differently because of what they've done here is not just unethical, it might be criminal. Obstruction of justice, obstruction or impeding an official proceeding or the president's constitutional duties. Obstructing the president's constitutional duties. You'll find that in US code 18 1505. Making false statements. Did they misrepresent what they knew to the executive or to Congress? The answer is yes, in their own writing. The answer is yes. Mishandling of classified material and the sworn duty to report a threat? Yep. Coordinated to conceal? Yes, in their own writing. We have that. Now you're into a conspiracy. This carries decades of prison time. Why do we have these laws? Why do we have these punishments if we never enforce them? Their entire oath is to guard the nation's secrets, brief our leaders. The betrayal The betrayal here is stunning. And by the way, that wouldn't be a call for vengeance. That's a call for restoration, to restore the republic and what it's supposed to do. If this If this can be proven, if these documents prove to be real, if the people who did this don't answer for it, not to settle political score but because a self-governing people cannot survive being lied to by its own protectors, then everything is on the table. We must have prosecutions where the law demands them. Reforms with teeth, so no one ever again gets to decide what an existential threat to this country is. I got news for you. Nothing is above the pay grade of the people who actually own this country. And by the way, that's you. Nothing is above your pay grade. Nothing is above the presidential pay grade. These people need to pay for what they have done. Not because I'm after them, but because it cannot happen again to any president. I don't care which party. No No intelligence company or agency can keep information from the executive, from the president of the United States. Period. How hard is that for the media to understand?