July 17, 2026, 6:14 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON – Among President Donald Trump’s many assertions about election insecurity in his July 16 nationwide address, perhaps none was more alarming than his accusation that China carried out the “largest compromise of election data in history” through its “illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.”
Not true, according to the documents the White House released alongside Trump’s address.
The assertion that Beijing compromised the 2020 election was a centerpiece of the president’s broader claim that China “fought like hell not to have a Donald Trump win” – and engineered his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden by leveraging “all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S. president.”
The information China acquired, Trump said, included names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other “sensitive” data needed to register to vote.
“U.S. spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020, when they discovered that tens of millions of voter data – think of that, tens of millions of voters’ data – in 18 states have been bought, stolen or hacked by China,” Trump said. “Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden.”
It was, Trump said, “an unprecedented election security nightmare.”
But the newly declassified U.S. intelligence records released by the White House to support Trump don’t back up many of those assertions, according to a USA TODAY review of the documents.
They indicate that Beijing primarily sought to predict election outcomes and influence voters in the United States to be more pro-China as opposed to changing anyone’s vote or somehow using their voter data to fraudulently vote for them.
China “probably also continued longstanding efforts to gather information on US voters and public opinion; political parties, candidates and their staffs; and senior government officials,” according to one key classified intelligence community assessment provided to Trump, senior administration officials and congressional lawmakers on Jan. 7, 2021. A declassified version of the assessment was publicly released in March 2021.
“We assess Beijing probably sought to use this information to predict electoral outcomes and to inform its efforts to influence US policy toward China under either election outcome,” the assessment by the National Intelligence Council said, “as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008 and considers an acceptable tool of statecraft.”
The NIC went even further in contradicting Trump’s statements during his speech Thursday night: “We assess Beijing did not interfere with election infrastructure, including vote tabulation or the transmission of election results.”
On July 16, a spokesman for the Chinese government, Liu Chang, told USA TODAY that the “U.S. election is an internal matter of the U.S. 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.”
‘No information suggesting China tried to interfere’
The NIC assessment also contained a dissenting view from the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber – an analytical disagreement that Trump didn’t mention specifically in his address.
And while it said China took at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances, that was primarily done “through social media and official public statements and media.”
The National Intelligence Officer for Cyber, the report said, agreed with the overall intelligence community view that Beijing “was primarily focused on countering anti-China policies” but believed that some of Beijing’s influence efforts were intended to at least indirectly affect U.S. candidates, political processes and voter preferences.
“The NIO agrees that we have no information suggesting China tried to interfere with election processes,” the report concluded.
And while U.S. intelligence officials believe China might have accumulated millions of American voter records, it’s likely that Beijing purchased at least some of them through commercially available means, according to elections experts and former U.S. officials who worked on election security.
“His own documents show much of that data came from public websites … and that the Chinese apparently didn’t do anything with it,” said Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security during his first term. Taylor has since become an outspoken critic of Trump.
As some state election officials were quick to point out after Trump’s speech, voter data are largely public records in most states, Taylor wrote in a lengthy July 17 Substack post. “If a foreign actor unlawfully scrapes that data, it’s unlawful, but it doesn’t touch a single ballot, a single tabulator, or a single result.”
A review of the declassified documents indicates that the data was largely lists of people who are registered to vote, their addresses and other basic information.
One of the declassified records, Taylor said, states that voter registration information was downloaded from “U.S. commercial websites,” including online data brokers who obtain and sell the data.
The same document, Taylor said, adds that the data from Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma and Rhode Island “was downloaded by a Chinese actor on 14 January 2022.”
That’s 14 months after Biden’s victory, and thus could not have contributed to Trump’s loss. Biden received 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 and won the national popular vote 81.2 million to 74.2 million votes.
Despite Trump’s longstanding claims he actually won the 2020 election, he and his supporters have lost 64 cases across six swing states challenging the results.
Voter information is public
David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights official who now heads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, also said the data is publicly available – and that there’s not much China could do with it anyway if it wanted to meddle in an election and change the outcome.
“It sounds bad when you hear about it,” Becker told CBS News. “The reality is voter files in the United States are public.”
The data is widely used by political parties and campaigns for voter outreach and other purposes, Becker said, and some states, like Ohio and North Carolina, post it online for free, while others, like California, sell it for a minimal fee.
What’s more, Becker said, China would not have been able to change voter registration data or vote on people’s behalf.
“I might have the entire class list for a college or university, but that doesn’t mean I can go in and change the grades,” Becker said. “That’s what’s happening here.”
Election officials from various states were also quick to clarify that their data was secure after Trump aired his accusations.
“I have no information, either from the federal government or anybody else, that Arizona’s voter information has been compromised,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told Votebeat, which tracks elections and election administration.
Fontes, who was attending a summer meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State in South Dakota, said he saw “zero evidence” in Trump’s speech backing any of his comments about Arizona.
“It appears to me to be a repackaged version of all of the stuff that we’ve known for years,” Fontes said, “and I was a little disappointed in the lack of new information.”
Documents show first Trump administration had info
Trump also alleged that “members of the deep state” worked against him by trying to downplay China’s acquisition of the voter data, “covering it up from both the president and the American people.”
But as Taylor noted, he and other senior U.S. officials briefed Trump on Chinese meddling as far back as 2018 – and he even confirmed that by speaking publicly about it.
“The documents the White House released are the briefings,” Taylor wrote. “They were produced by his own administration’s analysts, during his own presidency, and delivered to his own White House.”
“Even if the president didn’t actually read them, his team did,” Taylor added. “And I can personally attest that he was verbally briefed on the threats. Because I was one of the briefers.”
Trump was “so taken with what we told him about foreign meddling,” Taylor said, that he gave a speech about it to the United Nations.
“Regrettably we found that China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election coming up in November against my administration,” Trump said in the Sept. 26, 2018, speech. “They do not want me or us to win because I am the first president ever to challenge China on trade and we are winning on trade.”
