In a national address on Thursday night, President Trump declassified troves of documents that he said proved serious vulnerabilities in American elections. The White House website published four batches of disclosures that China has stolen the voting records of 220 million Americans, that voting machines are vulnerable to outside hacks, that the intelligence community downplayed risks in 2020, and that 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote.
“Our purpose in disclosing this information is not to weaken confidence in elections, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly,” Trump said in his prime time address from the East Room at the White House.
The president also painted a dire picture, despite his assurances. He claimed that the U.S. government intelligence community has been misleading the American people and presidential administrations and that voting methods need an overhaul.
“Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it,” he said.
But the documents provided paint a less clear picture. Many are heavily redacted or contain unverified information. Some include private emails that do indicate members of the intelligence community withheld information from the President’s Daily Brief and claimed to be running a shadow government behind Trump’s back.
Overall, the president last night claimed that foreign interference tainted the 2020 presidential election, but not the 2016 or 2024 elections. He also refrained from specifically claiming that any elected lawmakers were illegitimate or that the alleged interference has changed American election results. It was more restrained than some had hoped.
According to the president, China spent years working to exploit American political divisions and tamper with elections. He said that the Chinese Communist Party has hacked 220 million voter records from 18 states and could change them without individual voters knowing. But he stopped short of saying whether such an effort had ever even been attempted, let alone that it had been successful.
“We’re taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected, so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again,” Trump said.
The administration has not clarified which 18 states were affected or singled out any, despite ongoing federal probes in Georgia and Arizona. Trump also claimed that China paid journalists, whom he did not name, to promote negative coverage of him and his administration.
The emphasis on foreign interference marks a notable shift from Trump’s dismissal of investigations that followed the 2016 election, which focused on Russian cyber operations – a controversy that Trump coined the “Russia Hoax.” The documents the White House published Thursday night indicate that the intelligence community was tracking ways that Russia was seeking to undermine the Biden campaign in 2020.
It is unclear whether the president’s speech will change relations with China, and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told reporters at the White House Friday that he did not know whether China would face repercussions for its alleged influence campaign.
Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Sobolik said that the report does not clearly charge China with specific wrongdoing. He told RealClearPolitics that if the allegations are true, he has concerns about Trump’s relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“It surprises me not at all that China is trying to do this, because they’re a data vacuum,” Sobolik said. “They exist to build up profiles of individuals in strategic countries for their own influence campaigns.”
“But there’s a difference between could and did. China, as far as we know, did not actually meddle in American elections,” Sobolik added. “If these capabilities are real, then I think it’s a fantastic thing that we’re talking about it out in the open before it actually happens.”
In one document, the FBI records a complaint from someone claiming that the Chinese Communist Party was giving tens of thousands of fake driver’s licenses to Chinese students in the U.S. so that they could vote for Joe Biden in 2020. The claim said that the CCP was doing this by mining addresses from TikTok accounts. But the document shows that the claim was never verified, and an attached FBI comment points out that TikTok does not require addresses to make accounts.
Sobolik also said the claims aired last night do not jive with Trump’s handling of President Xi, who is expected to visit the White House for a summit in September. Navarro declined to answer a question on whether the trip was still on.
“Why is he being so transactional and accommodative with Xi Jinping?” Sobolik said in an interview. “Why is he embracing stability and great power relations with Xi Jinping right now? Why did he allow TikTok’s algorithm to remain under CCP control? Why is he sending high-end AI chips to China right now? I do not understand any of Trump’s approach to China in the past 18 months if he’s alleging that the CCP actively looked for ways to make sure he was not reelected.”
Other documents also allege that Russia was seeking to tamper with the 2020 presidential election but not the 2016 or 2024 elections. One declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says that Russia sought access to voting machines but could not do so at a scale large enough to alter the results of the election.
One of the president’s document drops includes private emails within the intelligence community about what to include in the President’s Daily Brief. In one instance, members appeared to be editing out references to China’s attempt to exploit political divisions. One person wrote, “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”
In a briefing this morning, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that investigations are ongoing and that, if criminal conduct is found, prosecutions will be referred. If there is no criminal conduct, Mullin said the government would ensure the involved people would never hold a security clearance again.
But the lack of clear action has frustrated some among the president’s Make America Great Again base. Former Trump senior counselor Steve Bannon said on his podcast Friday that he wanted to see more.
“I was decidedly unimpressed by that,” Bannon said of Mullin’s press conference. “We need to see names and solutions. I think we’ve got to hit rewind on that and do it again next week.”
Voting Machines and Voter Rolls
Ahead of the speech, some observers speculated that the president might add Venezuela to his list of countries that he claimed influenced elections. White House Government Transparency Task Force adviser John Solomon, the founder of Just the News, clarified at the White House last night that Venezuela is not accused of tampering with American elections. But he said the White House is concerned that the Maduro regime tampered with its own nation’s voting machines, which use the same security protocols as the United States.
The overall IC reports maintained that neither Russia nor China successfully tampered with elections, but included some dissent from within the intelligence community that the government should take the threat more seriously. In one message, intelligence analyst Nikki Floris, now at Microsoft, wrote that the FBI had a red line about including a minority report on China’s involvement. In her email, she says the minority’s claims that Beijing intended to sway elections and promote protests lack evidence.
Another National Intelligence Council memo reported that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all had capabilities in 2020 to compromise election infrastructure. But on the same page, the report notes that systems for tabulating, transmitting, and displaying election results would be extremely difficult to manipulate on a scale large enough to change election results. Nevertheless, the report assessed that voter registration databases, pollbooks, and official election websites are particularly vulnerable.
Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin was part of a group, along with conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, that began drafting the SAVE America Act. Martin told RCP that she believed the White House’s argument about the vulnerability of voting machines and the need for software updates. Martin told RCP that the newly declassified information might change the findings in states that had already conducted audits.
“Local and state election officials need to review the evidence that has now been declassified, so they understand the vulnerabilities that the systems they are using may present, and then they have got to do the updates necessary to make sure they are protecting those systems immediately,” Martin said.
The White House claims that 278,000 noncitizens have been identified with current voter registrations, 250,000 of which are in four states. But fewer than half the states are complying with the government’s requests for their voter data, and most have already conducted several audits.
Beginning in July 2025, the Justice Department requested unredacted voter registration databases from every state and the District of Columbia, seeking sensitive personal information including dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and Social Security information. Sixteen states complied, while others – some led by Democrats and some by Republicans – refused. Throughout the year, federal judges have rejected the Justice Department’s voter-roll demands in 15 lower court and appellate cases, finding that federal law does not compel states to disclose such data to the federal government.
The DOJ also began circulating letters to every state reminding them of federal voter laws and demanding that they “clean up voter rolls” and referenced criminal liability for illegal voting. Some states took that as a threat.
“Your insinuations of criminal violations of the federal election laws are not well taken,” Idaho’s Civil Litigation and Constitutional Defense division wrote back. The DOJ had also filed a lawsuit against Idaho’s Secretary of State Phil McGrane for failing to hand over a complete, unredacted electronic copy of the state’s computerized voter registration list. Idaho had already conducted several reviews of the voter rolls and found 15 cases among the state’s 1.1 million voters that it said might merit criminal prosecution.
The administration has made efforts to exert greater control over federal agencies that oversee election operations, launching election monitors in 15 jurisdictions across six states to increase voter confidence. Concurrently, Trump fired the two Democratic members on the Election Assistance Commission, and the third Republican commissioner resigned. The EAC is an independent bipartisan agency that helps states administer elections, certifies voting systems, and distributes federal election funding.
Next Steps
Overall, the president used the speech to again urge Congress to pass a bill requiring proof of citizenship and photo identification to both register to vote and cast a ballot. The SAVE America Act has stalled in Congress, where the Senate does not have 60 votes to pass the legislation or to vote to bypass the filibuster. Following the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who supported the legislation, lawmakers have speculated that they could add a financial incentive for state compliance, which could allow them to include the bill in the budgetary reconciliation process (which only requires a simple majority in the Senate). Following the speech, few Republicans seemed to publicly accept the president’s call to supercharge the effort.
In his briefing, DHS Secretary Mullin said that within 30 days, the Election Security Team and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will present a new election security plan. Mullin said voting in the midterm elections will be safe, but states must cooperate with the government to turn over their voter rolls. He also accused what he called activist judges of preventing them from accurately investigating the president’s claims. A new team at DHS is combing through every voter record connected to an illegal alien to see if that person actually cast a ballot that was counted.
In his address, the president also said the government would be working closely with every state affected by a Chinese data hack.
After the speech, Trump briefly celebrated with an assembled team of staffers and cabinet officials.
“Oh, he was having fun,” Peter Navarro told RCP. “He thanked John Solomon profusely and some others who had participated. He was in good humor.”
