President Donald Trump accused members of the U.S. intelligence community of operating a “shadow government” to conceal evidence of China’s efforts to influence U.S. elections.
Trump seized on newly declassified emails Thursday night that he says reveal intelligence officials deliberately hid significant reporting from his presidential briefings.
“We have deliberately massaged our one pending (presidential daily brief) to avoid any direct links to the election,” an NSA analyst allegedly wrote in one of the emails.
“Those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden. They did not disclose it to me as president or to anyone else.”
Trump did not claim China changed votes or altered election results. Instead, he argued Beijing engaged in an influence campaign aimed at shaping U.S. public perceptions.
The newly released emails show analysts disagreed over whether Chinese influence operations should be explicitly linked to elections. After the NSA analyst described “massaging” the President’s Daily Brief, other intelligence officials questioned the decision.
One wrote “the mind boggles.” Another called the approach “highly irregular.”
One official alleged the intelligence community was “deliberately avoiding mentioning a connection to elections for non-substantive reasons,” according to a November 2020 email. That official sought to reconnect the intelligence to the election-security assessment and prevent what another described as an “analytic objectivity mistake.”
Trump used the disclosures to press Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, casting the newly released intelligence as evidence that lawmakers must tighten federal election rules before the midterms.
“Most importantly, addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America Act,” Trump said. “These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I’ve mentioned.”
The SAVE America Act passed the House in February but stalled in the Senate in March, when a 53–47 vote fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance it.
The legislation would require documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections, photo identification to vote, and ongoing state efforts to identify and remove noncitizens from voter rolls. Absentee voters would be required to submit a copy of an eligible photo ID when requesting a ballot and again when returning it.
Trump also called for eliminating mail-in voting except in cases of illness, disability, military deployment or travel. The current text of the SAVE America Act does not include that prohibition.
Trump urged Americans to call their senators and representatives and demand its passage “without delay.”
Trump went further Thursday, claiming an FBI official wrote that she was running a “shadow government” to prevent the China intelligence from becoming public.
Trump directed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Justice Department, FBI and CIA Thursday to investigate why the intelligence was withheld, fire anyone found to have participated in a cover-up and pursue criminal charges “if appropriate.”
China denied any interference in U.S. elections.
“China has all along adhered to the principle of non-interference in other’s internal affairs,” Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Chang told Fox News Digital. “The U.S. election is an internal matter of the U.S. Its outcome is determined by the votes of the American people. China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S.”
Trump is still expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in September, a senior White House official told Fox News.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in response to the address: “Americans heard the president once again repeat claims about our elections that have been investigated for years and repeatedly rejected by the Intelligence Community.”
