President Donald Trump is expected to use his Trump speech Thursday night to raise previously unreported allegations of Chinese meddling in U.S. elections. The White House has said only that the address will come on Thursday evening, and Karoline Leavitt said nobody knows yet what Trump will ultimately say.
The audience is expected to include members of the president’s cabinet, along with the heads of the CIA, FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security who were invited. Some cabinet members will not attend because of scheduling conflicts.
Karoline Leavitt on Thursday evening
Leavitt said, “As usual, anonymous sources are speculating about what President Trump will say during his speech on Thursday evening.” She added, “The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in.”
Trump announced the primetime address earlier this week and has disclosed few details about its content. He has hinted that the speech will focus on elections, a subject he has repeatedly raised in connection with the 2020 election.
China and the 2020 election
Sources familiar with the matter said one part of the address could involve allegations that Beijing compromised U.S. voter data. They also said another part could point to evidence that the CIA knew about the action and did not share that information with Mr. Trump during his first term.
That claim sits against an early 2021 assessment by the National Intelligence Council, which said with high confidence that China did not attempt to influence the 2020 election’s outcome. The assessment said Beijing decided neither a Biden nor a Trump victory was advantageous enough to risk getting caught meddling, and it found no interference with election infrastructure, including vote-counting.
The same assessment included a minority view from the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber, who found in April 2020 that Chinese intelligence analyzed multiple U.S. states’ election voter registration data. A report on Chinese and Russian exploitation of U.S. data was declassified in 2022 and remained heavily redacted, and its unredacted portions did not accuse China of trying to manipulate the data or interfere with election processes.
National Intelligence Council assessment
The April 2020 report suggested China’s goal in analyzing voter registration data was public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election. It did not say how China got access to the data or how sensitive the data was.
The 2021 assessment also found that Russia tried to denigrate the Biden campaign and that Iran tried to undercut the Trump campaign, while saying neither Russia nor Iran attempted to attack election infrastructure. It found no indications that any foreign actors attempted to alter voter registrations, ballot casting, vote-counting or any other technical aspect of the 2020 election process.
Trump’s Thursday night remarks would put those competing intelligence views back in front of a cabinet-level audience in prime time. The unresolved issue is the evidence he will cite for any claim that Beijing compromised U.S. voter data.
