When President Donald Trump addressed the nation on Thursday, he wanted the world to believe that China stole the 2020 election from him. Instead, he dropped fresh evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin had worked to hand it to him.
Among the newly declassified intelligence documents Trump released Thursday are assessments that the Russian president and senior Russian officials directed proxy efforts to spread allegations about Joe Biden and Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden was a board director, orchestrate a corruption scandal against the Democratic nominee, and “ensure the President’s victory,” a reference to Trump, who was the incumbent at the time.
Rather than reinforcing Trump’s claim that Beijing worked to stop his re-election, the pages spotlight an intelligence assessment that Moscow sought to help it.
In a primetime address from the White House on Thursday, Trump accused China of compromising the 2020 election by stealing or hacking data and trying to make sure he didn’t win. To back up the claims, he announced the release of newly declassified documents from the CIA and other agencies.
The declassification effort is being run in part by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, led by former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. He is working alongside White House official Kurt Olsen on a broader push to re-investigate the 2020 results, according to sources familiar with the process.
One of the documents describes Putin and senior officials overseeing proxy efforts to spread claims that Biden, as vice president, engaged in criminal activity in his dealings with Ukraine and Burisma. The document says operatives affiliated with the Russian government advanced these narratives with U.S. officials and other prominent figures, through personal interactions as well as audio and documentary releases via U.S. and Ukrainian outlets.
It goes on to say these figures were conspiring to intensify their efforts as the election approached, aiming to “orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal” implicating Biden and the Democratic Party in order to help Trump win.
The document describes an intelligence assessment that Russian government-linked proxies were working to damage Biden’s candidacy ahead of the vote, relying in part on U.S. officials and other prominent people to amplify the narratives, though many of the people involved remain redacted in the public version.
Sam Stein, who was politics editor for the Daily Beast from 2017 to 2020 and is now managing editor for The Bulwark, called the release “really incredible,” noting the documents confirm Russia tried to spread the Burisma allegations “with US officials.” Bulwark senior reporter Will Sommer separately flagged a document confirming that China, contrary to Trump’s claims, did not interfere with voting systems, writing on X that the release includes a classified graphic making clear that Russia was the country that was actually trying to meddle.
The broader document set also includes older material on election vulnerabilities. A National Intelligence Council report from January 2020 concluded that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have the capability to access and potentially manipulate U.S. election data, such as voter registration databases, though it cautioned that because American elections are decentralized, any breach would likely be too localized to alter an outcome.
A CNN review of the broader release similarly found the material largely restates vulnerabilities that have been known for years, and that none of it supports the claim that any past election, including the one Trump lost in 2020, was manipulated by foreign interference in a way that changed the result.
Trump’s address was quickly picked apart by experts. Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins immediately afterward that, despite the president’s claims, there was still no evidence any election result had been affected, adding that the promised documentation still hadn’t materialized.
CNN’s Zachary Cohen separately reported that the material Trump cited largely covers issues that were already widely known and reflected in a 2021 U.S. intelligence community assessment.
