This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.
Full discussion transcribed after this:
by Rod D. Martin
July 18, 2026
I appeared on NTD Newsroom with Don Ma to go in-depth on the President’s speech, how the CCP exploited glaring U.S. election vulnerabilities, and the treasonous complicity of American intelligence agencies.
It’s 12 minutes that quickly explain this incredibly complex issue. Watch the interview, and pass it along!
See Also:
Here’s our full discussion:
Don Ma: President Trump says his administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by China. Joining us now to discuss this is Rod Martin, foreign policy analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital.
Thank you for joining us today, Rod. When you first heard Trump say last night that China acquired some 220 million U.S. voter files - names, addresses, phone numbers, political affiliations - what was going through your mind?
Rod D. Martin: It’s just horrifying. But it actually tracks very well with a segment in which you and I discussed a related Chinese endeavor a year ago. It has since been discovered, declassified, and disclosed that the Chinese were actually processing the data on the back end of a lot of states’ voting machines. The data, which is supposed to stay in the United States, was actually being transmitted out of the country.
We’ve had cases where it was going to German servers and Venezuelan servers, but the Chinese servers, in light of this revelation, are all the more damning.
The truth of the matter is that, in that same discussion you and I had, we talked about the fact that it has now been revealed that the Chinese had printed at least 60,000 fake ballots in California that they were able to catch. Now, if they found 60,000 fake ballots, how many more were out there?
So you put it all together. You have the Chinese actually hacking 220 million voter records in 18 targeted states that we know of. We know they were in a position to manipulate the back-end data from the voting machines. We also know they were printing fake ballots. That costs money. You don’t do that if you don’t mean to do something nefarious with them.
That really brings us to the fourth point, which is the most crucial of all: the idea that the American intelligence community would downplay this in the President’s Daily Brief when it needed to be acted on, highlighted, investigated, and solved.
Instead, our intelligence community hid this information not only from the president but, therefore, from law enforcement. So, in a very real sense, whether they were in direct communication with the Chinese or not is irrelevant. They were complicit. They were enabling this to happen. And that’s borderline coup d’etat territory.
Nothing matters more than educating the next generation with the values we cherish. The Herzog Foundation is making that possible. Learn more here.
The National Security Implications
Don Ma: DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that as well today: that there’s no question the intelligence community did this, as you said, and hid this information. What is the national security implication right now?
Rod D. Martin: It’s extraordinary. With regard to the Chinese, that’s an issue for diplomacy. We’re not going to go bomb Beijing over this, but I don’t doubt that this president will do things that are rather forceful, at least metaphorically.
Internally, we have a much greater problem. The first one is one I’ve been highlighting for 30 years. I’ve been involved in politics since I was a teenager. I’ve been on various Republican county, state, and national committees. I’ve been trying to sound the alarm from the beginning.
There is no such thing as an unhackable voting machine. In fact, I’ve seen children hack voting machines. It’s not really that hard. What is hard is detecting it, because the people responsible for supervising elections have no capacity whatsoever to see if some virus has been introduced into a voting machine, or if some algorithm is there that switches some number of ballots. They have no way to know. None whatsoever.
Anytime they plug a machine into the internet to get a software update, there’s a risk. This has been completely ignored by most county clerks in most of the United States. That’s just not what they do.
It is essential that federal law enforcement, and ideally the intelligence community, be on top of that. The truth is, they’re not. So you really need to get rid of the voting machines. No remotely secure election is possible without paper ballots.
Elon Musk has been sounding the alarm on that for a couple of years. Praise God for him. We’ve got to take it seriously. Voting machines are vulnerable, period. Nothing is going to change that except banning them.
Don Ma: The other good thing about paper ballots is that you can’t hack a piece of paper, right?
Rod D. Martin: It’s even more than that, Don. We know all the ways you can cheat. People have been cheating with paper ballots for centuries, so we’ve figured it out. It’s stuff you can teach volunteers. People can actually understand how to police this. They can’t police lines of code.
Don Ma: Right. I wanted to follow up on a point you made earlier about China’s intentions. You were saying that China wouldn’t do this if it didn’t have a goal in mind. What could it potentially do if it had hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files? Could that allow it to map demographics, for example, and identify swing areas?
Rod D. Martin: Oh, yes, absolutely. To the degree that this involved targeting messages at specific groups of people for the purpose of, for instance, starting riots or causing civil unrest, this data was invaluable for properly targeting that sort of messaging.
But we know that’s not all there was to it, because we know they had access to the back-end data for these voting machines, which they could have manipulated in China, not even on the local machines. We also know they were printing ballots. Why would you do that?
Obviously, the United States has done a lot of things that benefit China, whether you’re talking about admitting it to the World Trade Organization under Clinton or choosing not to enforce a particular tariff, or whatever else you can come up with.
To achieve those kinds of policy goals, you need people in the United States in positions of power to execute them. Not necessarily because they’re engaged in espionage or working directly with the Chinese. That’s probably not true in most cases. But having people who are friendly to China, as opposed to people who are not friendly to China, in key positions is definitely a goal that would make you want to cheat if you could bring that about.
In the case of Donald Trump, he is the first president in any of our lifetimes since, what, Richard Nixon before 1971?, who has meaningfully opposed the CCP in any way. During the Cold War, that made sense because we were triangulating against the Soviet Empire. That’s all fine. After the Cold War, it’s been more sinister. It has had some ugly effects.
And only Donald Trump has stood up to them. Of course they wanted him out of office.
Chinese Espionage and Intelligence Community Complicity
Don Ma: One thing I find incredible is that this operation China is conducting is massive. It seems like China doesn’t even care about being found out because of how big this thing is. It’s just brazenly doing this. Maybe I’m being naive about China’s intentions, but it seems like China doesn’t even care about being found out.
Rod D. Martin: The documents are very clear. The White House declassified them and uploaded them to the internet. Anybody can read them for themselves.
If the intelligence community was actually downplaying the threat, the Chinese had cover within the intelligence community. How much of that did they know about? I don’t know.
But we just had the sentencing, I believe today, of a former high-ranking Federal Reserve official who was charged with economic espionage on behalf of the Chinese. He was in contact with Chinese agents on a regular basis for years. Money changed hands, the whole thing. And he’s going to prison now.
So we know that Chinese espionage has compromised senior government officials. How many people in the intelligence community fall into that category? That’s exactly what John Ratcliffe has to deal with right now. And not just him, but Kash Patel, because this is a counterintelligence operation.
If you don’t actually deal with the people who may either be compromised or complicit without meaning to be, you’re never going to get to the root of this.
Ultimately, our intelligence community was running interference for the Chinese Communist Party. That’s what the documents show. They did it to prevent Donald Trump from knowing, and thus being able to do anything about it, in 2020. Then the Biden team just didn’t care.
It’s very clear from how they handled this afterward that it wasn’t something they wanted to deal with, in part, no doubt, because they didn’t want the possibility of delegitimizing Biden’s election. But they left the vulnerabilities intact. The Chinese can still exploit those vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis if nothing is done.
Mail-In Voting and the SAVE America Act
Don Ma: It appears the Trump administration is taking these vulnerabilities and gaps more seriously right now. Let’s see if, over time, they can close those gaps.
Let me get your opinion on one last thing, Rod. What do you think about mail-in ballots?
Rod D. Martin: Mail-in ballots are a disaster. It’s just an invitation to fraud.
Take California, where they mail ballots to every known address, however many people have ever lived there. They don’t clean the rolls. They’ve made a big deal of saying that if we clean the voter rolls, that’s voter suppression.
No. If seven people have lived at an apartment and they were all registered to vote over a period of 10 years, and you send seven ballots to that apartment, first of all, you’re not being accurate. You’re not getting the ballot to the voter. But second, that’s just an invitation for someone to pick up those seven ballots, mark them, and then hand them to a ballot harvester who puts them in one of the drop boxes.
It is utterly insecure. It’s crazy. No country in the world does this except certain parts of the United States. That has to stop.
Our liberal friends are always telling us how much better Europe is. Yet no European country allows this. Every European country requires voter ID. All these things that are in the SAVE America Act are just common-sense reforms that every serious country on Earth implemented long ago.
This is something we have to act on immediately. The Senate has to move the SAVE America Act. If not, I would encourage the president to look at Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, which requires the federal government to guarantee a republican form of government to each of the 50 states.
If you don’t have free and fair elections, you don’t have a republican form of government. It is absolutely essential that the president use his constitutional powers to ensure the security of our elections.
Don Ma: The other thing about mail-in ballots is that they can potentially delay the counting. I remember that, during the California counting process, Vice President J.D. Vance said that a week later they weren’t just counting the ballots; they were still receiving ballots.
Rod, thank you for speaking with us today. It’s always good to have you on.
Rod D. Martin: Good to be here.
