When Great Britain revealed two years ago that its voter registration databases had been hacked by China, the United States government expressed outrage. What it did not reveal was that American intelligence agencies had known since 2020 that Beijing had done the exact same thing to the United States — and had kept that explosive secret hidden from the American public, from Congress, and apparently even from the President himself.
Documents and interviews with officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence confirm that Chinese intelligence officials obtained and analyzed voter registration data from multiple American states ahead of the 2020 presidential election. A once-highly classified April 2020 National Intelligence Council memo, quietly declassified by the Biden administration two years after it was written, states plainly: "Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple U.S. states' election voter registration data to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election."
Six years later, the U.S. intelligence community has still not fully informed the American people or Congress about the breadth of the evidence, how Beijing obtained the data, or what operations China contemplated or carried out using it. Several sitting senators told Just the News they have never been briefed on any Chinese effort to access American voter registration files — even as the Senate this week debates the Save America Act, a landmark election security bill that is a top priority for President Trump.
"It's quite remarkable it has been kept a secret this long," a former intelligence official who worked during the Biden administration told Just the News.
What the Intelligence Shows
The NIC memo, entitled "Cyber Operations Enabling Expansive Digital Authoritarianism," was written in April 2020 and quietly declassified by then-DNI Avril Haines in October 2022 — two years after it was written — with heavy redactions. Despite its significance, it has received virtually no public attention.
Current and former U.S. officials told Just the News that intelligence agencies possess several raw reports dating to spring 2020 documenting China's access to American voter registration data across multiple states, as well as finished intelligence products referencing those breaches — including at least one presidential daily briefing. The single heavily redacted passage in the declassified NIC document is the only piece of this evidence that has reached the public sphere.
Former National Intelligence Council officer Christopher Porter — who worked on the China cyber hacking portfolio under Trump and attempted to raise the alarm as a whistleblower — confirmed the evidence is both solid and extensive.
"We knew by April 2020 that Chinese intelligence had voter registration data from multiple states and was analyzing it with an eye toward the 2020 election," Porter told Just the News. "But CIA blocked efforts to inform President Trump and later stopped many of these reports from being made available to Congress."
The consequences for Porter personally were severe. "During the Biden administration, when I raised concern about the legal requirement to share these and other reports with Congressional oversight, they changed my job to exclude me from elections and then fired me," he said.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe — who served as Director of National Intelligence at the end of the Trump administration and filed a dissent at the time suggesting China was more involved in attempting to influence the 2020 election than U.S. spy agencies were willing to acknowledge — is now working alongside DNI Tulsi Gabbard to declassify a potentially explosive tranche of raw intelligence documents showing what China did, who in the U.S. government knew about it, and when.
The Voter Data and What It Could Be Used For
Voter registration data is not the same as ballots. But it is far from harmless in foreign hands. American voter files contain sensitive personally identifying information, including driver's license data and partial Social Security numbers. In the hands of a sophisticated foreign intelligence service, that data could be exploited to construct convincing fake social media personas designed to manipulate public opinion — or, more alarmingly, to submit fraudulent absentee ballot requests in the names of real registered voters.
The FBI was sufficiently concerned about the latter possibility that it documented a specific Chinese scheme in a bombshell intelligence report turned over to Congress by FBI Director Kash Patel last June. That August 2020 report, bluntly titled "Chinese Government Production and Export of Fraudulent US Driver's Licenses to Chinese Sympathizers in the United States, in Order to Create Tens of Thousands of Fraudulent Mail-in Votes for US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden," described a Chinese government operation to mass-produce fake American driver's licenses and distribute them to Chinese sympathizers in the United States for use in submitting fraudulent mail-in ballots favoring Biden.
The report was recalled — and intelligence agencies were ordered to delete it — the day after then-FBI Director Chris Wray testified before Congress that he had seen no evidence of large-scale voter fraud efforts. It was subsequently buried for years.
Adding to the concern, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had reported in July 2020 that its officers had seized 1,513 shipments containing fraudulent documents — a total of 19,888 counterfeit U.S. driver's licenses — in the first half of that year alone. CBP noted that "the majority of these shipments were arriving from China and Hong Kong." The agency did not directly link the fake licenses to voter fraud, but the timing and volume are difficult to dismiss.
A Coordinated Campaign of Influence
The voter registration hack and the fake ID scheme were not isolated incidents. They were part of a broader, coordinated Chinese government effort to interfere in the 2020 presidential election and damage Donald Trump's candidacy.
The Chinese state-sponsored online influence campaign known as "Spamouflage Dragon" — run by China's Ministry of Public Security — launched an aggressive English-language operation in 2020 targeting American audiences with anti-Trump propaganda. The campaign attacked Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, amplified racial tensions following the death of George Floyd, and produced videos directly aimed at suppressing Trump support, including one titled "When I voted for Trump, I almost sentenced myself to death."
Google's Threat Analysis Group terminated 186 YouTube channels tied to Chinese influence operations in April 2020, 1,098 in May, and 1,312 in June — a staggering volume of coordinated inauthentic behavior aimed squarely at the American political conversation in the months leading up to the election.
The Justice Department has since formally confirmed the scope of China's involvement. A 2023 DOJ indictment charged seven Chinese hackers linked to the MSS's APT31 group with a 14-year campaign of computer intrusions targeting political dissidents, government officials, and campaign personnel. The indictment specifically noted that "the Conspirators targeted email accounts belonging to several senior campaign staff members for a presidential campaign" beginning in March 2020 — and that "targets also included election campaign staff from both major U.S. political parties in advance of the 2020 election." A subsequent 2024 indictment confirmed that Chinese government-affiliated actors had "materially impacted the security of networks associated with or pertaining to U.S. political organizations, candidates, and campaigns during the 2020 federal elections."
Kept in the Dark — Even Now
The revelation that China accessed American voter registration data is politically explosive on multiple levels. It validates years of concerns about election security that were systematically dismissed by the establishment media and Democratic politicians. It raises serious questions about why the CIA actively blocked efforts to brief President Trump on the breach during the 2020 election — and why the Biden administration, once in office, sat on the intelligence rather than informing Congress or the public. And it lands in the middle of a Senate debate over the Save America Act at a moment when several senators are only now learning, through press reports, that China had access to the very voter files the legislation is designed to protect.
Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters, Trump's point man for the 2026 midterms, told the John Solomon Reports podcast he was completely unaware of the intelligence. "What's crazy is the fact that China has access to these voter rolls, but we don't," Gruters said.
DNI Gabbard's team has been briefed on China's access to the voter registration data and is actively working to declassify the raw intelligence reports for public dissemination. CIA Director Ratcliffe, who was among the first to sound the alarm about China's election interference activities, has made clear that "America's adversaries will be exposed and held accountable for any attempt to undermine" the integrity of American elections.
That accountability is long overdue. The American people were denied critical information about a foreign power's interference in their elections — not by accident, but by a series of deliberate institutional choices to suppress, recall, and classify intelligence that told an inconvenient story. The full truth is only now beginning to emerge.
DNI Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe are working to declassify additional documents related to China's access to American voter registration data. The Senate is currently debating the Save America Act.
Documents and interviews with officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence confirm that Chinese intelligence officials obtained and analyzed voter registration data from multiple American states ahead of the 2020 presidential election. A once-highly classified April 2020 National Intelligence Council memo, quietly declassified by the Biden administration two years after it was written, states plainly: "Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple U.S. states' election voter registration data to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election."
Six years later, the U.S. intelligence community has still not fully informed the American people or Congress about the breadth of the evidence, how Beijing obtained the data, or what operations China contemplated or carried out using it. Several sitting senators told Just the News they have never been briefed on any Chinese effort to access American voter registration files — even as the Senate this week debates the Save America Act, a landmark election security bill that is a top priority for President Trump.
"It's quite remarkable it has been kept a secret this long," a former intelligence official who worked during the Biden administration told Just the News.
What the Intelligence Shows
The NIC memo, entitled "Cyber Operations Enabling Expansive Digital Authoritarianism," was written in April 2020 and quietly declassified by then-DNI Avril Haines in October 2022 — two years after it was written — with heavy redactions. Despite its significance, it has received virtually no public attention.
Current and former U.S. officials told Just the News that intelligence agencies possess several raw reports dating to spring 2020 documenting China's access to American voter registration data across multiple states, as well as finished intelligence products referencing those breaches — including at least one presidential daily briefing. The single heavily redacted passage in the declassified NIC document is the only piece of this evidence that has reached the public sphere.
Former National Intelligence Council officer Christopher Porter — who worked on the China cyber hacking portfolio under Trump and attempted to raise the alarm as a whistleblower — confirmed the evidence is both solid and extensive.
"We knew by April 2020 that Chinese intelligence had voter registration data from multiple states and was analyzing it with an eye toward the 2020 election," Porter told Just the News. "But CIA blocked efforts to inform President Trump and later stopped many of these reports from being made available to Congress."
The consequences for Porter personally were severe. "During the Biden administration, when I raised concern about the legal requirement to share these and other reports with Congressional oversight, they changed my job to exclude me from elections and then fired me," he said.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe — who served as Director of National Intelligence at the end of the Trump administration and filed a dissent at the time suggesting China was more involved in attempting to influence the 2020 election than U.S. spy agencies were willing to acknowledge — is now working alongside DNI Tulsi Gabbard to declassify a potentially explosive tranche of raw intelligence documents showing what China did, who in the U.S. government knew about it, and when.
The Voter Data and What It Could Be Used For
Voter registration data is not the same as ballots. But it is far from harmless in foreign hands. American voter files contain sensitive personally identifying information, including driver's license data and partial Social Security numbers. In the hands of a sophisticated foreign intelligence service, that data could be exploited to construct convincing fake social media personas designed to manipulate public opinion — or, more alarmingly, to submit fraudulent absentee ballot requests in the names of real registered voters.
The FBI was sufficiently concerned about the latter possibility that it documented a specific Chinese scheme in a bombshell intelligence report turned over to Congress by FBI Director Kash Patel last June. That August 2020 report, bluntly titled "Chinese Government Production and Export of Fraudulent US Driver's Licenses to Chinese Sympathizers in the United States, in Order to Create Tens of Thousands of Fraudulent Mail-in Votes for US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden," described a Chinese government operation to mass-produce fake American driver's licenses and distribute them to Chinese sympathizers in the United States for use in submitting fraudulent mail-in ballots favoring Biden.
The report was recalled — and intelligence agencies were ordered to delete it — the day after then-FBI Director Chris Wray testified before Congress that he had seen no evidence of large-scale voter fraud efforts. It was subsequently buried for years.
Adding to the concern, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had reported in July 2020 that its officers had seized 1,513 shipments containing fraudulent documents — a total of 19,888 counterfeit U.S. driver's licenses — in the first half of that year alone. CBP noted that "the majority of these shipments were arriving from China and Hong Kong." The agency did not directly link the fake licenses to voter fraud, but the timing and volume are difficult to dismiss.
A Coordinated Campaign of Influence
The voter registration hack and the fake ID scheme were not isolated incidents. They were part of a broader, coordinated Chinese government effort to interfere in the 2020 presidential election and damage Donald Trump's candidacy.
The Chinese state-sponsored online influence campaign known as "Spamouflage Dragon" — run by China's Ministry of Public Security — launched an aggressive English-language operation in 2020 targeting American audiences with anti-Trump propaganda. The campaign attacked Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, amplified racial tensions following the death of George Floyd, and produced videos directly aimed at suppressing Trump support, including one titled "When I voted for Trump, I almost sentenced myself to death."
Google's Threat Analysis Group terminated 186 YouTube channels tied to Chinese influence operations in April 2020, 1,098 in May, and 1,312 in June — a staggering volume of coordinated inauthentic behavior aimed squarely at the American political conversation in the months leading up to the election.
The Justice Department has since formally confirmed the scope of China's involvement. A 2023 DOJ indictment charged seven Chinese hackers linked to the MSS's APT31 group with a 14-year campaign of computer intrusions targeting political dissidents, government officials, and campaign personnel. The indictment specifically noted that "the Conspirators targeted email accounts belonging to several senior campaign staff members for a presidential campaign" beginning in March 2020 — and that "targets also included election campaign staff from both major U.S. political parties in advance of the 2020 election." A subsequent 2024 indictment confirmed that Chinese government-affiliated actors had "materially impacted the security of networks associated with or pertaining to U.S. political organizations, candidates, and campaigns during the 2020 federal elections."
Kept in the Dark — Even Now
The revelation that China accessed American voter registration data is politically explosive on multiple levels. It validates years of concerns about election security that were systematically dismissed by the establishment media and Democratic politicians. It raises serious questions about why the CIA actively blocked efforts to brief President Trump on the breach during the 2020 election — and why the Biden administration, once in office, sat on the intelligence rather than informing Congress or the public. And it lands in the middle of a Senate debate over the Save America Act at a moment when several senators are only now learning, through press reports, that China had access to the very voter files the legislation is designed to protect.
Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters, Trump's point man for the 2026 midterms, told the John Solomon Reports podcast he was completely unaware of the intelligence. "What's crazy is the fact that China has access to these voter rolls, but we don't," Gruters said.
DNI Gabbard's team has been briefed on China's access to the voter registration data and is actively working to declassify the raw intelligence reports for public dissemination. CIA Director Ratcliffe, who was among the first to sound the alarm about China's election interference activities, has made clear that "America's adversaries will be exposed and held accountable for any attempt to undermine" the integrity of American elections.
That accountability is long overdue. The American people were denied critical information about a foreign power's interference in their elections — not by accident, but by a series of deliberate institutional choices to suppress, recall, and classify intelligence that told an inconvenient story. The full truth is only now beginning to emerge.
DNI Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe are working to declassify additional documents related to China's access to American voter registration data. The Senate is currently debating the Save America Act.
