Donald Trump has been accused of using an address to the nation to make "totally bogus" claims of interference in the 2020 US election.
The US president used a 25-minute speech on Thursday night to contradict assessments from America's own intelligence agencies, alleging China had carried out "the largest compromise of election data in history"
He said he was declassifying sensitive information that showed Beijing had illicitly acquired 220 million voter files, including names, addresses and other data used to register to vote.
He claimed members of the US intelligence community deliberately suppressed what Beijing had done. Many of the documents released alongside the speech, however, are redacted.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said China "has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the US".
An assessment conducted in 2021 under then US director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe, who is now the CIA director, found no evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election, which Mr Trump lost to Joe Biden.
Mr Trump did not present any evidence in the speech that any ballots were tampered with or that foreign interference altered voting systems or changed the outcome of the election.
Mr Trump has long falsely claimed that vote was stolen. He has brought his case back into the spotlight to press Republicans in Congress to pass legislation imposing new voter ID and citizenship requirements ahead of the midterm elections in November.
The White House had sought to hype up the address ahead of time, but – perhaps wary of the need to fact-check the president's claims first – several US networks chose not to broadcast it live on their main channels.
Democratic Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the "shocking bombshells" promised had been shown to be "totally bogus".
"The fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election," he added.
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