Trump uses White House speech to renew claims of election fraud, accusing China of stealing voter files

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Donald Trump accused China of stealing 220 million voter files during the 2020 election cycle, describing an act of “sinister election meddling” in a primetime White House speech that he used to renew calls for Congress to pass a law that would require new forms of identification for American voters.

But documents released by Mr. Trump to back his claims contain direct rebuttals of his allegations, including a comment from the Department of State that it was convinced China was not, in fact, interfering in U.S. elections.

Mr. Trump, who has spent years arguing that his 2020 election loss was the result of voting fraud, took aim in his Thursday speech at Democrats, “members of the deep state,” people living in the U.S. who are not American citizens and the manufacturers of electronic voting equipment.

The country’s election system is “so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it,” Mr. Trump said.

He said the U.S. government has discovered that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens had been registered to vote in just four states, although it’s not clear whether any of those people are accused of voting.

In a statement on X, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said only citizens are allowed to vote in state and federal elections, adding that voter “fraud is EXTREMELY RARE — and almost always committed by U.S. citizens.” In June, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had created a database that wrongly identified some citizens as foreigners.

In parallel with his speech, Mr. Trump released a series of files, although some of them were so heavily redacted that only a few words were visible. Some of the files, however, contrasted with Mr. Trump’s claims. One, for example, said data obtained by Chinese hackers appeared to be part of a “bulk collection” effort, and “most of the entries were targets in other countries.” Another said that Chinese data collection efforts were broad in scope, including voter databases but also “a polling data company, political and non-profit organizations, fundraisers, and advisory organizations for political campaigns.”

A series of emails from members of the intelligence community suggests that neither the CIA nor the FBI were convinced that China had meddled in U.S. elections.

One CIA document accused Chinese hackers of “targeting” Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign – it makes no mention of Mr. Trump – before concluding that the intelligence community “assesses that China does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election.”

But others in the office of the Director of National Intelligence – whose director is politically appointed – had concluded that “Beijing has taken some low-level, exploratory steps to denigrate the President and shape voter perceptions ahead of the election.” Another document blames “unidentified pro-China influence actors” for spreading critical content on U.S. platforms – although those efforts, a different document suggests, were “small in scale, gained little traction, and were promptly shut down by social media companies.”

Another e-mail from the Department of State, however, is more categorical: “We actually do possess positive evidence about China’s intent – and it suggests China probably is not interfering in the election.”

That document says Chinese efforts to shape U.S. public opinion on policy issues are different from election meddling. “We object to language that blurs the line between these two activities and implies interference is happening.”

In a statement sent to multiple media outlets ahead of Mr. Trump’s speech, Liu Chang, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the country “has all along adhered to the principle of non-interference in other’s internal affairs.”

“The U.S. election is an internal matter of the U.S.,” Mr. Liu said. “Its outcome is determined by the votes of the American people. China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S.”

Mr. Trump delivered his speech against a backdrop of political trouble. His inability to wrest a quick victory over Iran has once again elevated gasoline prices and hurt his popularity.

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Nonetheless, supporters called Mr. Trump’s allegations extraordinarily serious. “This may be the most important Oval Office address since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The time for complacency with China is over,” Bernie Moreno, a Republican Senator from Ohio, wrote on X.

Adam Schiff, a Democratic Senator from California, countered that Mr. Trump has a lengthy record of lying about elections, warning that any mistruths could “set the stage to contest the midterm elections to come.”

Two of the three major American broadcasters, ABC and NBC, declined to carry the speech live. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent Democratic congresswoman, had said networks should not “be contributing to any platforming of lies about our elections.”

The U.S. has investigated reports of foreign election interference since at least 2016, when federal reports documented Russian attempts to influence and hack the vote in Mr. Trump’s favour. No evidence has emerged that those attempts altered outcomes.

In 2020, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called that year’s election “the most secure in American history.” The agency’s director, Chris Krebs, was subsequently fired by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump is not the first president to challenge the outcome of an election. In 2000, the Supreme Court was called in to end a weeks-long standoff over results in Florida, where the count were challenged in part over ballots with “hanging chads.”

But Mr. Trump has spent years denying the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden. In the months after the vote, Mr. Trump and his staff launched a series of lawsuits while seeking to pressure election officials across the country to overturn the results. The outgoing president famously urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.” Another plan – also unsuccessful – involved assembling a set of fake electors to create the outcome Mr. Trump sought.

In his Jan. 6, 2021, speech that preceded the riot at the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Trump also promised to “lay out just some of the evidence proving that we won this election and we won it by a landslide.”

“We will stop the steal,” he said.

The evidence he presented at the time consisted chiefly of conversations he recounted with “real pollsters” who, he said, had told him, “we were going to win.” He also said it was simply not possible to believe that Mr. Biden had won so many votes.

Shortly thereafter, some of the country’s most powerful lawmakers were left cowering in the U.S. Capitol as the violent mob broke in and roamed through the building.

Mr. Trump’s election fraud claims were tested and found to be without merit by numerous courts.

The idea that the election was stolen ”wasn’t true,” Liz Cheney, the former chair of the House Republican Conference, said in 2021.

In his second term, Mr. Trump has demanded major changes to elections in the country, leaning heavily on Congress to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE Act, which imposes a raft of new identification requirements on voters, including proof of citizenship and photo identification. The act would also obligate states to verify the citizenship of voters by coordinating with a federal database.

Trump wants voter ID requirements for U.S. midterm elections

The act has passed the House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate, with Democrats saying the legislation threatens to disenfranchise millions of voters who do not possess the identification that would be required to vote. House Republicans have pledged to use a legislative shortcut called reconciliation to force the passage of as much of the legislation as they can.

Some Republicans, however, have strongly opposed the legislation. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who was defeated in a primary by a Trump-backed opponent, said it is logistically impossible to implement the act’s sweeping requirements in time for November midterm voting.

“They’re being disingenuous to suggest to the American people they could possibly be operational by this election,” Mr. Tillis said this week. “And so then it begins to make me wonder ... if we’re just beginning to undermine the underlying integrity of any of our elections.”

He added: “And I think that’s dangerous, and I think it’s wrong.”

Mr. Trump has said he intends to root out fraud – despite no evidence that such fraud exists beyond small-scale problems – but has also been open about his partisan aims in altering election laws.

Pass the SAVE Act, he has told Republicans, and “it’ll guarantee the midterms.” Remove current methods for voting – including mail-in ballots, which Mr. Trump himself has frequently used – and “Democrats are virtually unelectable,” he wrote last year on social media.

With files from James Griffiths in Hong Kong