WASHINGTON—The FBI worked with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on the recent disclosure by President Donald Trump on foreign influence on U.S. elections, agency director Kash Patel said. 

During an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” aired on Aug. 8, Patel said the three agencies worked as partners, but the FBI played a smaller role, while DHS and ODNI had the technical capabilities and a remit focused more on overseas incidents involving U.S. election infrastructure.

“We shared our information. We made a lot of our information public through President Trump’s speech the other week,” Patel said. 

Patel said the three agencies acted at Trump’s direction.

“I think the president was right to go to the nation and the world and put forth this information, but it was only possible because the president directed us to declassify and divulge this information to the American public and the world,” Patel said. 

In a primetime address on July 16, Trump announced the declassification of documents that showed China had illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and other information.

“This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare,” Trump said during the address. 

Trump did not explicitly claim that China altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. 

China began targeting him in an operation in 2018, Trump said, citing a CIA report that described an effort to “reduce [his] votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection.”

The CIA report found “China was working to influence the results of the U.S. midterm elections, and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself,” according to Trump. 

In 2019, China had a strategy focusing on “undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president,” Trump added. 

“They wanted to just make [it] sound like your president wasn’t so hot when actually your president has done a great job,” he said.

That strategy included influencing U.S. business leaders to turn against him, Trump said.

“The Chinese government sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could,” he said. 

The declassified documents included a CIA wire memo from July 2000, which included information from the FBI, showing that the Chinese Communist Party was targeting “personal e-mail accounts of senior US leadership, including officials in the Executive Office of the President and high-ranking officials in multiple Executive Branch organizations, Congress, and the federal judiciary.”

Separately, a National Intelligence Council report found that “Beijing has expanded its cyber collection of data related to the 2020 US elections by carrying out opportunistic intrusions against US private-sector entities in efforts to collect information on US political candidates, campaigns, donors, and voter data.”

Trump’s claim on China’s election interference by targeting American voter registration data was backed by the heads of the ODNI, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a White House fact sheet released on July 30. 

In September 2025, Patel discussed China’s threats extensively during a hearing before the House Committee on the Judiciary.

China “presents the greatest and most sophisticated cyber threat to U.S. public safety and national security,” Patel said, according to written testimony.

He singled out one particular Chinese threat group, “Salt Typhoon,” which had breached the networks of multiple telecommunications companies in the United States and elsewhere.

Patel also noted in his written testimony that all 55 of his agency’s field offices had active Chinese counterintelligence investigations.

“This calendar year alone, as I was mentioning, our counterintelligence operations and cases brought against the Chinese are up by something like 40 percent,” Patel told House lawmakers at the hearing.

“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has deliberately created an environment that abuses global interconnectedness and encourages intellectual property theft, using human intelligence officers, corrupt corporate insiders, and reckless and indiscriminate cyber intrusions,” Patel stated in his written testimony.