President Donald Trump went on prime-time television on Thursday, July 16, and said he was declassifying documents that showed Chinese interference in U.S. elections. His own intelligence agencies had concluded the opposite about the 2020 vote.
The address ran 25 minutes. Trump said the papers would expose “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.” Reuters, which reported on the speech, said many of the documents appeared to show the reverse or had nothing to do with election infrastructure.
One CIA document, prepared in June, concerned Venezuela’s election. Another said, “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.” A third, also from the CIA, described Chinese spies targeting Joe Biden’s campaign. It added that Beijing “does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election,” though it allowed that China might change course later.
What Trump claimed
Trump said China had illicitly obtained 220 million U.S. voter files containing names, addresses and other registration data. He said members of the intelligence community had deliberately hidden how far China’s activities went. He also said his administration had found more than 275,000 non-citizens registered to vote in four states, though it was unclear how many had voted.
Two people familiar with the matter told Reuters the voter data China obtained was not confidential. Political consultants routinely buy voter files, they said, and the data could not be manipulated. Some White House officials had worried beforehand that releasing the China material could mislead, sources told Reuters.
The 2021 assessment
An unclassified U.S. intelligence assessment published in 2021 found no sign that any foreign actor tried to alter, or succeeded in altering, “any technical aspect” of the 2020 presidential vote. That covered voter registrations, ballots, tabulations and results. John Ratcliffe, then Trump’s director of national intelligence and now his CIA director, oversaw it.
The same report found that China had worked since at least 2008 to gather information on U.S. voters, public opinion, parties, candidates and senior officials, probably to predict election results.
Senator Mark Warner, the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement during the speech. “Trump’s shocking ‘bombshells’ about China are totally bogus,” he said. “Our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election.”
Reuters reported that Trump did not provide evidence of any 2020 votes being altered. It also noted that numerous courts and recounts found no evidence of large-scale fraud in that election.
China’s response and the politics
China’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Before the speech, Liu Chang, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said: “China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the US.” Trump hopes to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in September to talk about trade.
Trump again pressed congressional Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require photo ID to vote and proof of citizenship to register. Democrats and voting-rights advocates say it is meant to suppress legitimate votes. The bill has passed the House several times by simple majority but lacks the 60 votes needed to beat a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
Two of the three major U.S. television networks, along with CNN, chose not to carry the address on their main platforms. Midterm elections are in November, and Republicans are defending slim majorities in Congress.
