Update: Read coverage of President Trump’s speech on Thursday as it happened. Our earlier story appears below.
Part of President Trump’s speech Thursday night is expected to touch on previously unreported alleged Chinese meddling in U.S. elections, according to sources familiar with the matter.
One component: Allegations that Beijing compromised U.S. voter data and evidence the CIA knew about the action and didn’t share that information with Mr. Trump during his first term.
The audience for the primetime speech is expected to include members of the president’s Cabinet. Among those invited are the heads of CIA, FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security, as well as other agencies and staff. Some Cabinet members will not be there due to scheduling conflicts.
Asked for comment on the contents of the president’s address, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “As usual, anonymous sources are speculating about what President Trump will say during his speech on Thursday evening. The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in.”
Mr. Trump announced the primetime address earlier this week and has disclosed few details on its content, though he has hinted that it will focus on elections. The president has long insisted — falsely — that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to rampant fraud.
The question of Chinese involvement in the 2020 election has drawn some debate.
In an early 2021 assessment issued by the National Intelligence Council, the U.S. intelligence community assessed with “high confidence” that China did not attempt to influence the election’s outcome, with Beijing deciding neither a Biden nor a Trump victory was “advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.” Intelligence agencies also found China did not “interfere with election infrastructure,” including vote-counting.
But the assessment notes a “minority view” from the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber, who believed with “moderate confidence” that China did attempt to “undermine” Mr. Trump’s reelection bid in 2020, largely through social media and official statements. That official agreed, though, that the Chinese regime didn’t try to interfere with “election processes.”
Separately, the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber found in April 2020 that Chinese intelligence “analyzed multiple U.S. states’ … election voter registration data,” according to a report on Chinese and Russian exploitation of U.S. data that was declassified in 2022 but is heavily redacted. The report suggested China’s goal in analyzing voter registration data was to “conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election.”
The April 2020 report does not say how China got access to voter registration data, or how sensitive the data was. In many states, limited voter registration data is available to the public, though some data is confidential. The unredacted portions of the document do not accuse China of trying to manipulate the data or interfere with election processes.
Beyond China, the 2021 National Intelligence Council assessment found that Russia tried to denigrate the Biden campaign and Iran tried to undercut the Trump campaign, but neither country attempted to attack election infrastructure.
The report found “no indications” that any foreign actors attempted to alter voter registrations, the casting of ballots, vote-counting or any other “technical aspect” of the 2020 election process.
“We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits,” the report read.
