President Donald Trump asserted in a prime-time address to the nation that declassified intelligence revealed by his administration is evidence of widespread election vulnerabilities and argued that previous administrations conspired to suppress information about China’s plan to interfere in the 2020 election.
The documents, which were heavily redacted and published on the White House website, largely do not contain new information. None of the findings detailed by Trump indicate that China or any other country influenced the outcome of the 2020 election — a claim that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found was unsubstantiated in 2021.
Still, in what the White House billed as a major address, Trump demanded that his Justice Department investigate the findings and bring criminal charges where necessary.
“This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes — and really exposes like levels never thought possible — to hacking, exploitation and foreign interference,” Trump said.
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The Trump administration said the documents were compiled by intelligence agencies, including the CIA and FBI, during the Obama and Biden administrations, and were declassified in recent weeks.
“U.S. spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020, when they discovered that tens of millions of voters’ data … in 18 states had been bought, stolen or hacked by China,” Trump said. “Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information hidden.”
A National Intelligence Council report from March 2021 said that China did not “deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.” An intelligence officer disagreed with that conclusion, the report says, and argued “that China did take some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s reelection.”
Democrats responded to Trump’s speech by raising concern that the president would use this information to undermine the midterm elections this fall.
“The president was setting the context,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Connecticut) told MS NOW Thursday night. “He was setting the basis for him to turn around at midnight on Election Day and say, ‘I warned you. I warned you back in July that the Chinese were doing X, Y and Z and all this terrible stuff. It happened tonight. I’m deploying federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security to seven states. They will be seizing ballot boxes in those states because we know that lots of undocumented aliens voted.’”
Trump claimed the documents released Thursday demonstrate that China accessed U.S. voter data, aimed to influence the outcome of the 2018 midterm elections and 2020 presidential election, and engaged in coordinated attempts to undermine confidence in his presidency. Some of the documents released on the White House website show China obtained data from states, including names, addresses, voter affiliation and polling places. That info is often public information through requests to state officials and used by party committees for voter outreach.
Trump said that his administration found some of the information in “burn bags,” which are specific trash bags used to destroy classified information by physically burning them. He ordered the director of national intelligence to “investigate how and why such crucial information was hidden,” to fire those involved in the “cover-up” and to bring criminal charges where appropriate.
Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election — which he lost to Joe Biden — has persisted into his second term, despite nearly all of the dozens of court cases contesting the outcome being dismissed or dropped due to lack of evidence or standing. The 2020 election — which one expert told NOTUS was “probably the most investigated election in American history” — has remained a focal point of Trump’s for the better part of a decade.
Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election spurred the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump himself faced multiple criminal indictments and civil court proceedings over his efforts to undermine and overturn the results of the election.
Although the president claimed that declassified intelligence reports showed that China “assigned a data exploitation unit specifically” to hack and steal voter data — and said the CIA found that in 2018 China intended to leverage those stolen goods to make him resign or prevent his reelection — documents posted by the White House appeared to contradict that framing.
The first page of a July 1, 2020, CIA wire memo noted that the intelligence community “assesses that China does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election, although this activity could enable such operations, if Beijing made a decision to do so.” The CIA memo also noted that China’s cyber activities were “probably” a prelude to election espionage — not interference.
The notion that the Chinese government intended to influence U.S. politics instead comes from a follow-up Oct. 16, 2020, National Intelligence Council memo — which was not coordinated with American spy agencies — labeled an “alternative analysis” from an unnamed “national intelligence officer” and a second “election threat analysis” official. The pair “have less confidence than the rest of the” intelligence community that “influence efforts were not carried out.”
But a third unclassified document shows a Dec. 30, 2020, email from a senior FBI official expressing serious concerns about lending any credibility to the idea that China actually tried to impact American elections.
“The [national intelligence officer] assesses China ‘may’ have encouraged protests. There is no evidence of this in the reporting, and the citations associated with this … certainly do not support this assessment. This is highly misleading and a misrepresentation of the underlying reports,” wrote Nikki Floris, who was then the deputy assistant director in the counterintelligence division at FBI headquarters.
The president on Thursday also returned to his long-standing doubts about Venezuela’s voting history, claiming that documents the White House declassified and released showed that the country developed ways to “digitally alter” vote tallies in their own country, though he did not claim that they had digitally altered tallies in U.S. elections.
“This reporting included precise details about methods the regime developed to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could be detected, even with an audit, no matter how deep they went,” the president said.
The machines the president referenced were created by Smartmatic, a company that Trump and his supporters have repeatedly falsely accused of rigging the 2020 U.S. election. Smartmatic has sued over the claims.
A document declassified by the White House in June said that while intelligence from 2006 showed that the Venezuelan government “developed sustained interest and likely some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems,” it was concluded that neither Smartmatic or Venezuela had the ability to “manipulate the outcome of an election outside of Venezuela in a predictable fashion.”
Trump also stressed Thursday that his administration is investigating Michigan for improprieties in its election administration in 2020. Trump said the Biden administration “slow-walked” an investigation into claims that canvassers submitted fraudulent voter registration forms before killing the probe.
Last week, the Justice Department sent letters to three counties in Michigan saying it would send monitors to observe the elections after reports of fraud in the state’s 2024 election.
In addition to detailing the contents of the intelligence, Trump claimed that his Department of Homeland Security found evidence of thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls across the country.
Trump argued the findings should compel Congress to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, also known as the SAVE Act. The legislation would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, but does not have the support of enough Senate Republicans to bring it to a vote.
Many of the vulnerabilities in U.S. election infrastructure that Trump alluded to have been long known to the intelligence community and election security experts, who have not found evidence of foreign attempts to meddle with the results of recent elections. Much of that information has been made public previously.
The National Intelligence Council concluded in a 2021 report that there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
While intelligence reporting has extensively documented foreign influence campaigns and noted the potential for foreign governments to tamper with voter data, such meddling wouldn’t allow bad actors to change individual votes.
The U.S. election system is highly decentralized, run at the state and county level. The Constitution gives states the ability to regulate the “time, place and manner” of elections, and designates almost no role for the federal government in administering elections or counting ballots. Trump, though, has tried to wrest some control of those powers via executive actions.
Most states have received high marks from election watchdogs when it comes to securing their databases and machines, spending a combined hundreds of millions of dollars to bolster security in recent years.
Electronic voting machines, like any piece of technology, have vulnerabilities that could be exploited, but they are separate from voter registration databases. Experts agree it’s extremely unlikely that a foreign actor could crack into a large number of voting machines without swiftly being detected, let alone alter votes on a scale wide enough to change the course of an election.
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