When President Donald Trump talked about some of the things China has done to literally steal our democracy by seeing to it that, in 2020, its Manchurian candidate was elected in the form of a semi-comatose Joe Biden, many of the things he mentioned had already been in the news, but they may not have been covered by the legacy media.
Case in point: Trump mentioned in his July 16 address to the nation that China stole TikTok data to create fake U.S. driver’s licenses.
If you follow conservative media, you may have known this. If you get your news from the legacy media, you most likely didn’t know it, and if you heard it now, you won’t believe it. That’s the group Trump was targeting in his address. His national address strategy was to speak past the legacy media and to begin the process of planting the seeds of the truth in the minds of those who rely on the CNNs, ABCs, and NBCs of the world.
Strategically, Trump is now trying to break through the information barrier that the legacy media and the left have created to keep the majority of Americans in the dark on what’s really happened to corrupt our elections.
A year ago, Brooke Singman published a lengthy piece on the Fox News website that detailed just how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) executed its TikTok data theft scheme. Her primary source for the story was the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
The Senate Judiciary Committee launched its own investigation into this after the FBI had announced its own investigation in July 2025. As Singman reported, the CCP allegedly worked to get “fake driver's licenses to Chinese sympathizers in the U.S. who would cast a vote for candidate Biden.”
It is not clear how successful the CCP was in getting its ballots for Biden to count.
In July 2025, a Grassley spokesperson told Fox News, "Chairman Grassley is in receipt of an FBI document (response) to a request he made based on legally protected whistleblower disclosures…. The document alleges serious national security concerns that need to be fully investigated by the FBI.”
As stated in that document, the intent of the alleged scheme was for the People's Republic of China (PRC) to produce and export fraudulent U.S. driver’s licenses to Chinese sympathizers in the U.S., so as to create “tens of thousands of fraudulent mail-in votes for US Presidential candidate Joe Biden, in late August 2020.”
According to the document at the center of these investigations, by August 2020, “the Chinese government had produced a large amount of fraudulent United States driver’s licenses that were secretly exported to the United States,” Fox News reported.
The fraudulent drivers licenses would allow tens of thousands of Chinese students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party to vote for US Presidential Candidate USPER Joe ((Biden)), despite not being eligible to vote in the United States... China had collected private US user data from millions of TikTok accounts, to include name, ID and address, which would allow the Chinese government to use real US persons’ information to create the fraudulent driver’s license, the document states.
Reporting on the investigation indicates that the fake IDs included true ID numbers and the true addresses of U.S. citizens, which made the fraud difficult to detect.
"China planned to use the fraudulent driver’s licenses to account for tens of thousands of mail-in votes,” according to the document.
What’s not clear is how specifically the PRC accessed the TikTok data and got all the information it needed to create those fake driver’s licenses. TikTok, for example, does not require a physical address when users register for an account.
Did the creators of the fake IDs use the physical addresses of those Chinese sympathizers? This is fuzzy.
FBI Director Kash Patel and Grassley had been working closely on this case prior to the president’s speech on July 16.
Related: Did Former FBI Agent Nikki Floris Run a ‘Shadow Government' During the 2020 Election?
In another uncanny development from around the same time, in July 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the International Mail Facility (IMF) at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport announced that in the first half of that year, they had seized 1,513 shipments of fraudulent documents, which included 19,888 fake U.S. driver’s licenses. Most of those shipments originated in China and Hong Kong, as well as Great Britain and South Korea.
According to the CBP statement on the matter from 2020, “The driver’s licenses were for various people in different states with a vast majority destined for neighboring states. Most were for college-age students, and other licenses would share the same picture but have different biographical data. Another concern was the bar code attached to the Michigan licenses worked.”
In typical fashion, the Democrats’ propaganda machine known as the Associated Press reported at the time, “There is no evidence to suggest they were linked to voter fraud.” Case closed, I guess.
Maybe leftist newswire Reuters had a different take: “Facebook posts shared thousands of times claim that 19,888 fake driver’s licenses were seized at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport after being ordered by people ‘all registered to vote, all Democrats.’ Suggesting that the licenses were part of a voter fraud conspiracy, this claim is partly false. While it is true that U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 19,888 counterfeit licenses at O’Hare in late July, they had no apparent connection to Democratic Party registration or the upcoming election.”
So, you can see that in just two instances, the AP and Reuters, they were singing from the same song sheet. "Nothing to see here in the weeks before a presidential election. Keep moving."
Let’s try one more news site just to be fair. Were they all saying the exact same thing to the benefit of the Democrats and Biden in the weeks before the election?
“There’s no hint of any connection between the confiscated fake IDs and Democrats or voter fraud,” wrote the Chicago Sun-Times at the time.
No need to keep looking. The left’s damage control rapid response team made darn sure this story was snuffed out before it became national news and threatened Biden’s chances.
At the end of the day, China will be China. You should expect our adversaries to try to tamper with our elections. Interestingly, they all wanted Biden, and all they got Biden, and so did the legacy media.
What’s most troublesome is how the media so actively sought to kill any curiosity over those fake driver’s licenses from China, even though it was aware of the matter well before election day.
Of course, that pattern has continued. Even with active Senate and FBI investigations since July 2025, you’re more likely to see news of the Taylor Swift-Jason Kelce wedding than you are to see news of how your TikTok data could have been stolen and used by China to try to manipulate an American election.
This is not a bug; it’s a feature of the system. That’s what the Trump administration is up against, and it’s why he’s now taking his case directly to the American people.
You’re going to hear a lot more about this and other election integrity developments in the coming months directly from Trump and his people. If you’re an avid consumer of conservative media, most of this may not be new to you. But you must know that you are not the audience. It’s your cousin, or your aunt, or your coworker who doesn’t start thinking about an upcoming election until the final weeks before voting. It’s the people who still don’t want to believe that their elections may have been corrupted. That’s who the president is trying to reach.
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