President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address from the White House on July 16, 2026, on the subject of US election security. During the speech, Trump announced the declassification of intelligence documents and made a series of allegations involving China, the 2020 election, and a subsequent effort by intelligence officials to withhold information from him and from Congress.
While President Trump said that his claims are supported by classified and new documents, much of what he said was already documented and supported by publicly available intelligence community reports.
Trump said the declassified documents show that, “over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle,” China carried out what he called the largest compromise of election data in history, obtaining 220 million voter files. He said the stolen data included names, addresses, phone numbers, political party affiliations, and other information needed to register to vote, and that China assigned a dedicated data exploitation unit to the effort.
He alleged the intelligence community concealed the scope of the breach from him. According to Trump, spy agencies learned in 2020 that voter data in 18 states had been “bought, stolen or hacked” by China, but officials kept the information hidden rather than reporting it. He said it was never disclosed to him as president or, to his knowledge, to Congress, and that officials instead maintained the 2020 election was the most secure in the nation’s history.
Trump’s cover-up allegation is partly corroborated by Senate Judiciary Committee records. Chairman Chuck Grassley released FBI emails showing the Bureau recalled an Albany Field Office intelligence report alleging China was producing fraudulent driver’s licenses to manufacture mail-in votes for Joe Biden in 2020.
An FBI analyst wrote that the report was pulled because “the reporting will contradict Director Wray’s testimony,” and Wray had told the Senate Homeland Security Committee days earlier that the FBI had “not seen historically any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort.” An FBI review later found no indication the Bureau’s China task force ever pursued the lead further “despite corroborating intergovernmental reporting and logical investigative leads.”
The characterization of 2020 as the “most secure election in American history” is difficult to reconcile with the scale of last-minute changes to how ballots were cast and counted that year. A record 43% of votes nationwide were cast by mail in 2020, according to MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, roughly double the historical rate and the highest share in U.S. history. The Census Bureau found that 69% of voters cast a ballot “nontraditionally,” either by mail or before Election Day, a figure with no modern precedent.
Drop box use expanded to a similarly unprecedented scale. Before 2020, only eight states had explicit drop box statutes. By Election Day, however, drop boxes were in use in roughly 40 states, and Pew Research found that 41% of mail voters returned their ballots that way rather than by mail or directly to an election official.
Ballot receipt deadlines were also extended beyond Election Day in multiple states through last-minute court rulings. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court allowed ballots postmarked by Election Day to count if they were received up to three days later, North Carolina extended its receipt window to nine days, and Michigan allowed ballots to arrive up to two weeks afterward.
Each of these developments, record mail voting, record drop box use, and extended post-Election Day receipt windows, departed from prior practice during the same election cycle. That is the basis for describing the 2020 election as procedurally novel and potentially less secure, rather than more secure than prior contests.
Beijing’s influence efforts against Trump date back further than 2020. In mid-2018, per CIA reporting cited by Trump in the speech, “the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the US president in an effort to reduce the US president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection.”
Trump said the same reporting found China worked to influence both the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election, and that by mid-2019, Beijing’s strategy had shifted toward undermining domestic confidence in him.
That pattern continued into subsequent election cycles. A National Intelligence Council assessment, declassified in December 2023, found China “tacitly approved efforts to try to influence a handful of 2022 midterm races involving members of both U.S. political parties,” with the goal of countering politicians “viewed as anti-China” while supporting those “viewed as pro-China.”
PRC leaders “have issued broad directives to intensify efforts to influence US policy and public opinion in China’s favor” since 2020, and in 2021, Beijing “identified specific members of Congress to punish for their anti-China views and to reward for their perceived support of Beijing.”
PRC intelligence services, diplomats, and online influence actors “conducted activities to undermine or promote specific candidates from both major US political parties,” including “covertly denigrating a named US Senator online using inauthentic accounts” — a finding the assessment says is backed by “a Department of Justice indictment, FBI information, and private-sector reporting,” and one the intelligence community holds “high confidence” in. The same assessment notes a US media organization’s December 2022 report that PRC-linked TikTok accounts targeted candidates from both parties, garnering tens of millions of views in the United States.
A Senate bill introduced by Sen. Dan Sullivan, S.5365, cites a February 2024 ODNI threat assessment stating the PRC “aims to sow doubts about U.S. leadership, undermine democracy, and extend Beijing’s influence.” The bill was introduced and referred to the Foreign Relations Committee in November 2024 and has not advanced.
Trump also alleged, citing the same CIA reporting, that China sought to use contacts inside major US companies to turn American business leaders against him, and to pay American journalists to produce negative coverage. These specific allegations have not been independently corroborated in any declassified document reviewed for this piece.
Trump said FBI intelligence gathered in 2020, buried by “rogue bureaucrats,” included an allegation that Chinese activity extended to an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden. He said dozens of CIA and NSA reports on China’s election-related targeting were withheld from his presidential daily briefing, citing an email in which an intelligence analyst admitted to having “deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election.”
A declassified March 2021 intelligence community assessment on the 2020 election lends partial support to this allegation. It recorded a formal Minority View from the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber, who assessed that China “took at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances, primarily through social media and official public statements and media.” The same assessment found that Russian cyber operations “targeted and compromised US state and local government networks in 2020 — including exfiltrating some voter data.”
A separately released intelligence community assessment, Trump said, found that US adversaries “including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea” have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure, and that voter registration databases and other centralized election data systems are the most vulnerable to exploitation. Citing that material, Trump said his administration is now notifying the states whose data was compromised by China “and many others.”
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