President Donald Trump on Thursday released a series of newly declassified intelligence documents that he says show China tried to influence the 2020 presidential election and that members of the U.S. intelligence community worked to keep that information from him and the American people.
Speaking from the White House, Trump said the documents cover five major election security issues and accused the Chinese Communist Party of carrying out "the largest compromise of election data in history."
According to Trump, China obtained information from roughly 220 million American voter files, including names, addresses, phone numbers and political party affiliations. While much of that information is publicly available through voter registration records, Trump argued it could still be used for fraudulent purposes.
"They worked to actively suppress and downplay the extent of China's sinister election meddling — covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible," Trump said, referring to what he described as members of the "deep state" inside the intelligence community.
Trump also claimed China wasn't simply gathering information. He alleged Beijing wanted him out of office because of his tough stance on the country.
"The Chinese government wanted the U.S. president to lose the next election, and the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them," he said.
The president said intelligence reports discussing China's election-related activities never made it into his daily briefings, despite multiple CIA and NSA reports addressing the issue.
Among the documents released is an internal email from an unidentified official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stating the intelligence community was "deliberately avoiding mentioning a connection to elections for non-substantive reasons" in the President's Daily Brief.
Trump also pointed to a November 2020 email from a China analyst who wrote officials had "deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election."
Another document includes a message attributed to Nikki Floris, then deputy assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, saying she was "basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point" to keep intelligence about China's alleged election activities from becoming public.
The documents also reference efforts by FBI officials to suppress an intelligence report that claimed the Chinese Communist Party was producing fake driver's licenses that could be used to support fraudulent mail-in voting for Joe Biden. Those allegations were first reported to Congress in 2025.
At the same time, the documents released Thursday do not appear to fully support many of Trump's broader claims.
While they show intelligence officials believed China was attempting to influence Americans and viewed Trump unfavorably, many of those assessments were made with only low or medium confidence. The documents are also heavily redacted, making it difficult to evaluate some of the underlying evidence.
Trump also argued Americans have been misled about the security of the nation's election systems.
"They're vulnerable and they're easily compromised and people within our government knew that," he said.
He claimed foreign adversaries including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have the capability to target U.S. election infrastructure.
However, the documents themselves stop short of saying those countries could change vote totals. Instead, they suggest foreign governments could potentially hack local election systems but do not conclude they could alter election results.
Trump also referenced a 2020 voter registration fraud investigation in Muskegon, Michigan, where canvassers admitted submitting fraudulent voter registration applications. Local election officials caught hundreds of suspicious applications before they were processed, and investigators found no fraudulent registrations or votes were ultimately counted.
The president wrapped up his remarks by once again urging Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, legislation that would require voter identification nationwide and limit mail-in voting.
The bill has already passed the House but remains stalled in the Senate. Vice President J.D. Vance has encouraged Senate Republicans to bypass the filibuster and move the legislation forward through a spending bill that would require only a simple majority to pass.
Trump has argued since 2020 that the presidential election was improperly decided in Joe Biden's favor. Those claims have been repeatedly disputed by election officials, courts and members of Trump's own administration, including former Attorney General Bill Barr, who has said there was no evidence of widespread fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election.
