U.S. President Donald Trump spoke from the White House on Thursday for 25 minutes in prime time to unveil documents he says show that China meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The shift is an effort to revive a long-standing concern of his on election security as Republicans seek to hold on to their congressional majority in the midterm elections in November.

In his speech, Trump said the released documents reveal the country’s “shocking vulnerabilities” in its election system. He alleged that China had surreptitiously obtained 220 million U.S. voter records and that the intelligence community was lying about its efforts.

But these claims differ from a 2021 U.S. intelligence study undertaken under his current Central Intelligence Agency director, John Ratcliffe. That evaluation concluded that no foreign power managed to affect anything technically in the 2020 presidential election. Moreover, the fact that the voter information that China supposedly obtained is not confidential and is openly sold to political consultants, experts said.

Several of the newly released documents seemed to contradict the president. One was specifically about elections in Venezuela, and the other was about how difficult it would be to manipulate the vote counting of the U.S. voting system on a large scale. A third document indicated that Beijing had no plans to influence the outcome of the election covertly.

Push for New Voting Legislation Amid Political Headwinds

During the speech, Trump asked GOP lawmakers to move forward with the SAVE America Act. The languished bill would impose photo ID and citizenship requirements for voter registration, and severely limit mail-in voting.

The bill has been approved by the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives multiple times, but has not yet garnered the 60 votes it needs to move forward from a Democratic filibuster in the U.S. Senate. The bill has been opposed by many members of the Democratic Party and voting-rights activists as a bill that could suppress voter turnout.

It’s an opportune time for the president politically, as his approval ratings have been on the decline due to the high cost of gas and the continuing Iran war. Some top Republican leaders have called on Trump to pay attention to the growing cost of living instead of “re-litigating the 2020 election” because Democrats would need to win just three seats to gain control of the House.

Trump’s belligerent language also threatens to complicate ties with Beijing, which the president will be meeting with Xi in September to negotiate trade. Before the speech, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China made it clear that China will never and has never meddled in U.S. presidential politics.

The House of Representatives, for its part, was not broadcast on the three major U.S. TV networks or on CNN, two of which opted out of the coverage of the presidential address in the past.