United States President Donald Trump has renewed a campaign to cast doubts on the 2020 elections that saw him lose to Joe Biden – this time painting China as a major adversary that helped “manipulate” the vote.
Speaking in a primetime address on Thursday, Trump claimed that newly declassified intelligence material exposed foreign interference in the elections, despite intelligence assessments from the US government that stated the opposite. He alleged that Beijing illicitly gathered 220 million voter files “over a period of years” and executed “the largest compromise of election data in history” in 2020.
The Trump administration on Thursday also published hundreds of previously classified documents to back the president’s claims. However, a US intelligence report in 2021 concluded that China had considered, but ultimately had not deployed “influence efforts” to affect the 2020 election.
Responding to US media ahead of Trump’s speech on Thursday, Liu Chang, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the US, refuted the claims. “China has all along adhered to the principle of non-interference in others’ internal affairs. The US election is an internal matter of the US. Its outcome is determined by the votes of the American people. China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the US,” he said.
Several Democratic Party leaders have also reacted to the claims. Democrat Senator Mark Warner, in a series of posts on X, accused Trump of sharing misleading information in a bid to interfere with the coming November midterms. “Trump’s shocking ‘bombshells’ about China are totally bogus,” Warner wrote. “The fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election.”
Trump, as in recent months, cast doubts on mail-in balloting ahead of the midterms, saying that absentee voting was “inherently corrupt”. Analysis by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation inadvertently found there were only 300 cases of fraudulent absentee votes between 1982 and 2025. The Brookings Institution calculates that fraud in mail-in ballots accounts for four out of 10 million votes.
The president on Thursday also pointed to CIA findings on Venezuela to suggest that US voting machines are susceptible to digital manipulation. The intelligence document from last month, which summarizes reporting between 2004 and 2020, found that Venezuela’s government was capable of digitally manipulating electronic voting systems – in Venezuela, not the US.
Trump also claimed that about 278,000 non-citizens were illegally registered to vote in federal elections, citing a review by the Department of Homeland Security. A study from the Bipartisan Policy Center found that past state reviews found 0.04 percent of voters were non-citizens.
Separately, Trump said the FBI would reopen an election fraud case in Michigan, a Democratic stronghold. The 2020 case involved a voter-registration company that had collected some fraudulent or error-filled data, which was discovered before the election.
Extensive investigations by US intelligence agencies in 2021 found that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin authorized several Russian government agencies to conduct influence operations that sought to undermine the Biden campaign and pull support for Trump’s. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and Hezbollah in Lebanon also conducted efforts to influence the elections.
Source: www.aljazeera.com