Update: Read coverage of President Trump’s speech on Thursday as it happened. Our earlier story appears below.
President Trump is expected to use part of his Thursday night primetime address to discuss previously unreported allegations of Chinese interference in U.S. elections, according to people familiar with the matter.
One expected element centers on claims that Beijing compromised U.S. voter data, along with allegations that the CIA was aware of the activity but did not brief Mr. Trump about it during his first term.
The speech is expected to draw a high-level audience that includes members of the president’s Cabinet. Invitees include the heads of the CIA, FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security, along with officials from other agencies and staff members. Some Cabinet officials are not expected to attend because of scheduling conflicts.
Asked about what the president plans to say, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back on the reports. “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,” she said.
Mr. Trump announced the primetime address earlier this week but has offered few specifics about its focus, beyond suggesting it will involve elections. He has repeatedly and falsely claimed that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election.
The issue of whether China played a role in the 2020 election has been the subject of debate.
In a National Intelligence Council assessment released in early 2021, the U.S. intelligence community assessed with “high confidence” that China did not try to influence the election’s outcome. The report said Beijing concluded that neither a Biden nor a Trump win was “advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.” Intelligence agencies also found that China did not “interfere with election infrastructure,” including vote-counting systems.
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.”
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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.
