By Nandita Bose and Joseph Ax
WASHINGTON, July 17 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his effort to make election security a central issue in November's midterm elections, asserting that China interfered in the 2020 presidential campaign despite a U.S. intelligence assessment that found no evidence to support that claim.
During a nearly half-hour prime-time speech from the White House on Thursday, Trump revived many of his longstanding claims that U.S. elections are unreliable, citing
newly declassified documents that he said revealed "shocking vulnerabilities."
But many of the documents appeared to fall far short of backing his assertions. While Trump cast U.S. elections as highly vulnerable, he did not provide evidence of any votes in 2020 that were altered or manipulated.
HE PRESSES FOR PASSAGE OF THE 'SAVE AMERICA ACT'Trump used his remarks to again press fellow Republicans in Congress to pass legislation imposing new voter identification and citizenship requirements, despite established findings that voter fraud is rare. The bill, known as the SAVE America Act, has stalled in the Senate amid fierce Democratic opposition.
The speech came at a challenging political moment for Trump and Republicans, who are facing the prospect of losing one or both chambers of Congress in November with the president's approval rating weighed down by the unpopular Iran war and high energy prices.
Some Republican leaders have urged Trump to focus on issues that matter most to Americans, including high living costs, rather than the 2020 vote.
Trump briefly mentioned the war, saying the U.S. was "winning big," and listed domestic accomplishments such as tax cuts and his immigration crackdown before turning to election security.
The president said he was declassifying information that showed China had illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files, including names, addresses and other data.
He asserted that members of the U.S. intelligence community deliberately suppressed the extent of China's activities.
An unclassified 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment found no indications any foreign actor attempted to or succeeded in altering "any technical aspect" of the 2020 presidential election, including voter registrations, ballots, tabulations or results.
That assessment was conducted under John Ratcliffe, then Trump's director of national intelligence and now his CIA director.
The report found China had pursued an effort dating to at least 2008 to collect information on U.S. voters, public opinion, candidates and top government officials, likely aiming to use the material to predict election results.
Two people familiar with the matter said the U.S. voter data obtained by China was not confidential – voter files are routinely purchased by political consultants – and could not be manipulated.
TRUMP RISKS ROCKING RELATIONSHIP WITH CHINA
Trump's harsh language about China risked rocking a relationship that has steadied following last year's costly trade war. Trump hopes to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in September about improving trade relations.
Before Trump began speaking, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy, Liu Chang, said, "China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S."
Trump has spent years raising doubts about electoral outcomes, falsely asserting that his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden was rigged. He has also advanced other false claims, including that mail-in balloting is rife with fraud, voting machines are untrustworthy and non-citizen voting is widespread.
Numerous courts and vote recounts found no evidence of large-scale fraud in the 2020 election.
POLL SHOWS 63% OF REPUBLICANS BELIEVE 2020 ELECTION STOLEN
Nevertheless, Trump's campaign has gained traction with his supporters. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in April found 63% of Republicans believe Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trump said on Thursday that his administration had uncovered more than 275,000 non-citizens registered to vote in just four states, but he provided no evidence that any had actually voted.
In some previous cases, systems intended to verify citizenship status have mistakenly flagged some naturalized citizens as non-citizens. Studies have found that non-citizens casting ballots is exceedingly uncommon.
Trump also said that the newly declassified documents would reveal serious weaknesses in election security. But many either appeared inconsistent with that assertion or were unrelated to U.S. election infrastructure:
* One CIA document, prepared last month, concerned Venezuela's election, not America's.
* "We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results," another document said.
* A third document, produced by the CIA, detailed efforts by Chinese spies to target Biden's campaign and noted that Beijing "does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election."
"Trump's shocking 'bombshells' about China are totally bogus," Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement during the speech. "The fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election."
(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington; Additional reporting by Erin Banco, Doina Chiacu, Bo Erickson, Peter Eisler, Jonathan Landay, Edmund Lee, Michael Martina, David Morgan, Raphael Satter, Ismail Shakil, Kanishka Singh and Jasper Ward; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Don Durfee and Howard Goller)
