US President Donald Trump said on the 16th that China intervened in the 2020 US presidential election and illegally obtained large-scale voter data.
In a national address that day, Trump said the findings "were gathered by the excellent personnel of the White House government transparency task force and staff of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, and I personally reviewed these findings with the support of the heads of top intelligence agencies," adding that the results were disclosed through the White House website.
Trump said the findings "show that starting from the 2020 election period and over the course of several years, the People's Republic of China carried out what is considered the largest election data breach in history, and as a result, China illegally obtained 220 million US voter files."
Trump explained that the files contained voters' "names, addresses, phone numbers, party preferences, and sensitive data needed for voter registration and other immoral activities."
Trump criticized past US intelligence authorities, saying that although they were aware of this, they "kept that information secret and hid it" and "did not inform me, who was president, nor anyone else."
Trump then said, "I am releasing a series of previously classified US intelligence community assessments and other reports. These reports prove that our government and all voting-related machines are extremely exposed to attack."
Trump stressed, "As one assessment noted, we judge that at a minimum, US adversaries including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state entities, possess the capability to breach US election infrastructure."
However, US media outlets including The New York Times (NYT) and CNN, which operated real-time fact-checking teams, reported that the voter files China allegedly obtained were already publicly available records, and that no evidence was found to support actual manipulation of election results.
