By CNN staff
(CNN) — President Donald Trump, in a primetime speech Thursday night, alleged vulnerabilities exist in American election systems, despite declassified documents released by his administration largely discussing vulnerabilities that have been known for years and that election officials around the country have tried to address.
Trump said the speech and release of documents are not meant to “weaken confidence” in US elections, though critics say he has done just that. For years, the US president has spread falsehoods about the 2020 election.
In the remarks, he addressed his economic agenda, immigration policies, election integrity, China, and more.
CNN reporters followed along the speech and reviewed the declassified documents. You can read highlights of the coverage below:
Declassified documents shed light on scope of Chinese hacking targeting Americans
From CNN’s Sean Lyngaas
Documents that the Trump administration released on Thursday shed new light on just how voracious Chinese intelligence services have been in collecting information on Americans.
Cyber espionage, or the use of hacking to collect sensitive information, and the use of cyberattacks to disrupt elections are two very different things. The documents show China doing the former, not the latter.
The documents show the lengths that Chinese hackers allegedly went to spy on senior US government officials and the 2020 presidential campaign of Joe Biden.
One Chinese hacking group was using techniques to track the email accounts of Biden campaign staffers, suggesting that “the Chinese operators are mapping out the target network for follow-on approaches, possibly including tasking campaign staffers’ e-mail accounts in the Chinese military’s signals intelligence system for collection,” one declassified intelligence report says.
Other reports in the collection of documents note that Chinese government actors have been downloading voter registration information in numerous states. In some cases, the information was already publicly available. But there is no mention of China actively exploiting the data on voters it collected or stole. There is instead intelligence analysis of what China could do with the data.
The personal information on Americans taken by one Chinese actor “could, in theory, be leveraged to carry out anything from future CNE (computer network exploitation) operations to election influence operations, although the actual motivations for collecting this information is unknown,” one intelligence report said.
The documents paint a picture of Chinese intelligence services that are collecting just about any information they can on hundreds of millions of Americans. That, in the aggregate, is not a new revelation. Between the 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management and subsequent hacks of American health care providers and other companies, US intelligence officials have long warned that Chinese spies have a detailed picture of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of Americans.
Trump’s claim Venezuela hacked voting machines echoes allegations from an ex-Venezuelan spy
From CNN’s Maria Santana
The claim promoted by the White House tonight that Venezuela experimented with hacking its own voting machines echoes allegations made by former Venezuelan intelligence chief and convicted drug trafficker