Trump Alleges Sprawling Chinese Plot to Meddle in 2020 Election, Cover-Up by ‘Deep State’ Actors

President Trump on Thursday accused the Chinese Communist Party of attempting to boost Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election and claimed members of the U.S. intelligence community in the “deep state” were aware of the CCP’s meddling but carried out a cover up.

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Trump announced during an address to the nation that the White House had released newly-declassified documents covering five major areas of concern over election security in the U.S.

He alleged that China carried out “the largest compromise of election data in history” and was able to obtain data 220 million U.S. voter files, giving them access to names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and “other sensitive data.” While the information found in voter files is largely accessible by the general public, Trump claimed the information could be used to “register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.”

He went on to claim that “members of the deep state” in the U.S. intelligence community “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 despite claims from election officials that the 2020 election was “the most secure election in the history of our country,” that China “engaged in other election-related activities to undermine my first administration and our 2020 campaign.”

He says China was working to influence the results of the U.S. midterms in 2018 and later, the results of the 2020 presidential election. The president further alleges that China identified American journalists who had reported negatively on him and paid them “large sums of money” to write negative articles.

“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.

Trump has claimed, without evidence, since 2020 that the presidential election was rigged in Joe Biden’s favored. Top officials, including Trump’s then-Attorney General Bill Barr, have disputed his claims and have said no evidence of widespread fraud exists.

However, Trump on Thursday claimed there was a cover-up in the intelligence community about information regarding the alleged vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system.

Trump said that while dozens of CIA and NSA reports mentioned China’s election targeting, those reports were omitted from his daily presidential briefing.

An internal email from an unknown person in the Director of National Intelligence’s office said that the IC is “deliberately avoiding mentioning a connection to elections for non-substantive reasons” in the presidential daily brief.

Trump cited a November 2020 email that includes a Strategic Intelligence Analyst specializing in China admitting they had “deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election.”

And Nikki Floris, then-deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, wrote at the time that she was “basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point” to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known, according to the documents released Thursday.

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Floris was one of several FBI officials who worked to recall and suppress an Intelligence Information Report in late September 2020 that contained information from an FBI confidential source that alleged the CCP was producing fake drivers’ licenses for fraudulent mail-in-votes in support of Biden, according to Just the News. Those efforts were first reported to Congress in June 2025.

The documents Trump released on Thursday were heavily redacted, and in many cases did not appear to support his lofty claims.

For example, the documents show that there is evidence that China tried to influence Americans to support the CCP and that Chinese leaders were in fact critical of Trump. But the assessments around China came from intelligence officers who said they had only low or medium confidence in their findings.

Trump went on to claim Americans have been lied to about the security of U.S. infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems.

“They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised and people within our government knew that,” he claimed, adding that at least one assessment claimed U.S. adversaries including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea “have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.”

And while Trump suggested adversarial countries could have the ability to change votes, the documents he released instead suggests adversarial governments could hack local elections, but not change the results.

Trump pointed to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s successful efforts to rig vote counts within his own country in 2020 as evidence that a regime can digitally alter vote totals “in ways that could not be detected even with an audit.”

However, the documents Trump released include a CIA analysis that found Venezuelan officials had “some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems” to influence the outcomes of races in their own country, but that the officials did not have the ability to change votes in other countries.

Regarding vulnerabilities within the election system, Trump pointed to a 2020 investigation into a Democratic “get out the vote” operation in Muskegon, Mich., that saw canvassers admit to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist and received gift cards tied to the number of applications that they produced. However, investigators made the public aware of the probe at the time, and, reassuringly, the local clerk said hundreds of “irregular” applications had been caught, and no fraudulent votes or registrations were successful, a sign that the system was working as intended.

Ahead of his speech on Thursday, Trump said his remarks would focus on “free and fair” elections. The president has made passing the SAVE America Act a major priority; the legislation would limit mail-in voting and impose voter-ID requirements nationwide. He underscored the need for Congress to advance the legislation during the closing of his speech.

The legislation has received support in the House, but has been stalled in the Senate. Vice President J.D. Vance urged Senate Republicans to bypass the filibuster, calling it “procedural bullsh**,” to pass the SAVE America Act. Both Vance and Trump have suggested Republicans should pass the provisions of the SAVE Act via a spending bill, which would exempt the legislation from the 60-vote filibuster threshold and allow passage with a simple majority.

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