US President Donald Trump has declassified a batch of intelligence files that he said showed Chinese hacking and foreign interference in American elections. The documents were posted on the White House website as he delivered a prime-time address from the East Room on July 16.
Trump told viewers the material exposed “shocking vulnerabilities” in election infrastructure. He said the People’s Republic of China had illicitly acquired 220 million US voter files in what he called the largest compromise of election data in history.
Voter records in 18 states were bought, stolen or hacked, according to the president, while the Department of Homeland Security has identified about 278,000 non-citizens on federal voter rolls. He accused members of what he termed the “deep state” of burying the findings.
Trump stopped short of claiming that any votes had been changed or any result altered. Election officials and independent analysts said the released papers largely restated material already in the public domain.
An unclassified assessment published after the 2020 election, drawn up under John Ratcliffe, Trump’s director of national intelligence at the time, found that Beijing had stayed out of the race and had not touched vote tabulation. Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, called the new claims “totally bogus”.
The Chinese embassy in Washington said Beijing “has never and will never interfere” in US presidential elections, adding that the outcome was settled by American voters.
Similar allegations have already surfaced in Europe. British ministers blamed hackers linked to Chinese state security for a breach of the UK electoral register, which holds the names and addresses of 40 million voters, and cyber experts warned at the time that European Parliament elections were at similar risk.
The European Commission’s Democracy Shield, unveiled on November 12, 2025, names Russia rather than China as the principal source of foreign interference in the European Union.
Trump used the address to demand passage of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE America Act), which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register and photo identification to vote. The White House campaign for the bill holds up Germany for counting paper ballots and cites Denmark and Sweden for restricting postal voting to those unable to attend in person.
German voters can in fact all apply for a postal ballot, as can those in Greece, Luxembourg and Poland. The act cleared the House of Representatives in February by 218 votes to 213 but has stalled in the Senate, where minority leader Chuck Schumer said it was “dead on arrival”.
