“The People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files... Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden.”

Prime-time address to the nation, East Room of the White House

Voter files are largely public and for sale, which is the first thing the word illicit has to carry. The Election Assistance Commission reported that state voter files are widely available for purchase at prices ranging from nothing to $37,000, and that when such data appears on the dark web it is usually just public data that is widely available rather than evidence of a breach. One of the documents the administration declassified says that publicly available voter registration information for six states was downloaded by a Chinese cyber actor on January 14, 2022, and that the websites hosting those records are commercial websites, a point the document says was clarified in the report. An April 2020 intelligence conclusion, reached during his first term, found that Beijing analysed several states' voter registration datasets, and the intelligence released did not establish that China stole the data.

The concealment half does not hold up either. A former intelligence official's reading of the released documents finds that the 2020 China reporting was not buried inside a small compartment or withheld from the wider intelligence community, whatever disagreement later arose over its analysis. Two things cut the other way, and they are the claim's best defence. Chinese collection of American voter data is real and documented in the released record, and the same analysis finds the documents too heavily redacted to show how the 220 million figure was derived, how the data was obtained, or how much came from protected election systems rather than public or commercial sources. The administration's own companion release went further than the speech, saying intelligence agencies knew about the breach in at least 18 states and kept it hidden from the President and Congress.