The Documents Trump Declassified To Blame China For The 2020 Election… Actually Show Russia Was The One Meddling For Him

You might have heard that Donald Trump gave a weird, rambling, nonsense speech last night full of misinformation and lies, trying to spread distrust in our electoral process ahead of the 2026 midterms — so that when Republicans likely lose some of the power they currently wield across the government, Trump and his allies can pretend it was due to faulty elections. The President of the United States is literally undermining trust in elections, which is both dangerous and incredibly stupid.

At a fundamental level, none of it makes sense. He’s focused on the 2020 election, when HE was in charge of the government. Assuming that there really was a huge foreign effort then, wouldn’t it have also worked in 2024 when Trump won, but Biden was president?

But, more to the point, the newly declassified documents that the White House released, not only fail to support the rambling claims he made last night, but they actually show (pretty clearly) that China (who he blamed for foreign interference) not only deliberately chose not to engage in nefarious attacks on the US elections, but rather that the Russians, who have long supported Trump, did do so.

Let’s go through a few of the docs to show what they say.

The big one is the National Intelligence Council Assessment from 2020 (again, when Donald Trump was president). While (conveniently!) much of the Russia section is redacted, reading what’s in the document it says that Putin intended to support Trump and harm Biden:

But at the same time, it notes that while China probably preferred Biden over Trump, it was not making any real effort to impact the election beyond just spreading general anti-US messaging.

Multiple times throughout the documents, the Intelligence Community notes that while China might have the tools to exert influence over elections, it recognizes that attempts to do so would likely be exposed and lead to backlash, and thus sees little reason to take proactive measures against election infrastructure. See below, where they note that any such effort could backfire on Beijing.

There was a separate document (elsewhere described as the “minority view”) regarding China’s intent to mess with the US election, which disagrees with the majority view — but only at the margins. It notes, instead, that it believes “Beijing has taken at least some low-level, exploratory steps to undermine the president’s reelection chances…” but then later admits these steps were pretty minimal, and says that “these efforts probably have not included the use of Beijing’s most aggressive options… because Beijing wants to minimize the risk of blowback and hopes to stabilize the relationship after the election.”

Again, I feel the need to remind you, that these are the documents that the Trump administration just released to claim that China did a major hack of the 2020 elections. But the things THEY released literally say the opposite.

And while the fuller discussion of Russian attacks is redacted, it does include a few tidbits… including the fact that Russian operatives tried to spread false rumors about Joe Biden and Ukraine in the leadup to the 2020 election… and that they focused on convincing people in Donald Trump’s White House of these false claims.

On top of that this new release includes a super handy chart comparing efforts by Russia, China, and Iran — one that shows only Russia (not China) sought to manipulate the actual election process by “targeting, accessing, or manipulating election processes or election-related systems.” For China, it notes that while the country took preliminary steps, it did not observe any actual attack on our election system. But they did see it with Russia.

Can’t wait to hear again about how “Russiagate” was a hoax, when the documents that Trump himself released show pretty clearly that Russia was observed by Trump’s intelligence community attempting to manipulate the election in favor of Trump. China (whom Trump misleadingly blamed for manipulating the 2020 election) is shown in these documents not to have done anything more than “preliminary” explorations, but even the most hawkish view on China was that they didn’t want to do anything more aggressive for fear of eventual blowback.

So, uh, yeah.

Look, we all know what this was really about. Trump and his MAGA toadies know that the outlook for the 2026 midterms looks bad for the GOP. Really bad. Rather than, I dunno, figuring out why he has the lowest approval ratings of a president in ages, Trump refuses to accept the fact that he’s been one of America’s worst, most destructive, most corrupt presidents ever, and has decided to just cast doubt on the next election.

Indeed, as Tom Nichols writes, Trump’s speech last night clearly did way more damage to American elections than anything China sought to do.

The specifics don’t matter to MAGA cultists. They’ll be out there (and probably in our comments) ignoring what these documents actually say. They’ll repeat the false claims. They will claim any Democrat elected was elected via fraud. But the documents say what they say (even if the juicier bits about Russia are redacted). And they say Putin wanted Trump to win and took all sorts of efforts to help him out, including targeting our election systems. China lightly favored Biden, and while it may have taken exploratory steps, it realized that anything more serious would almost certainly blow up in its face — and chose not to interfere.

I know we live in an era where it often feels that facts don’t matter, but these are the facts. And the fact that they come from Donald Trump’s own declassification of documents that he pretends say the exact opposite of what they say is the kind of thing that I hope people remember on election day.