CNN anchor Jake Tapper joked that President Donald Trump’s highly anticipated Thursday address “could have been an email.”
The president teased that his primetime address would reveal shocking information surrounding voter fraud, but a CNN review of the declassified documents found they largely discussed previously known issues that were included in a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment.
Trump stated in his address Thursday that he asked DHS to let all states know that they must remove non-citizens and “ineligible voters from the lists immediately.”
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there may be more than 250,000 non-citizens voting in California, New Jersey, New York and Nevada.
“So what were the other takeaways from Trump’s primetime address that we were told would shock us?” Tapper asked. “Well, to be frank, it could have been an email. There wasn’t much new evidence and his big reveal was that there was newly declassified documents that he claim have been hidden from him and the American people.”
The documents alleged that China was obtaining information from hundreds of millions of voter files, but Tapper clarified that this had already been alluded to in the same 2021 intelligence community assessment, which found that China did not actually interfere in the 2020 election.
DHS chases voter fraud after Trump speech revives baseless election claims pic.twitter.com/6sD8pvTO4D
— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) July 17, 2026
The president also discussed how he wanted to prevent non-citizens from voting by passing the “Save America Act.
“We should note that it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal and state elections,” Tapper clarified. “There is very little evidence that non-citizens, undocumented immigrants vote on any scale of any significance.”
Tapper specifically added that election experts, even the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, said that votes from non-citizens are exceedingly rare in the U.S.
“The right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s database of confirmed fraud cases shows fewer than 100 examples of non-citizens improperly counting ballots between the years 2000 and 2025,” he said. “That’s a quarter century, less than a hundred.”
Watch the video of Tapper on “The Lead” on CNN above.
