In a late night speech from the White House on Thursday, President Donald Trump alleged that the Chinese government interfered in the U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020.
Trump cited CIA reports to claim that China attempted to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden and acquired 220 million U.S. voter files containing personal information. He also said the documents showed that “dozens” of CIA reports about Chinese targeting were kept out of briefings delivered to Trump.
“They had deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election” Trump said, claiming that an FBI official accused bureaucrats of “running a shadow government” to keep intelligence of China’s election meddling from becoming known.
Trump said that he was “asking the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the DOJ, the FBI and the CIA to investigate how and why such crucial information was hidden to fire those involved in the coverup, and to file criminal charges, if appropriate.”
Trump also used his speech to point out what he said were vulnerabilities in U.S. electronic voting systems.
The White House released documents Trump claimed proved “that our government has long known these machines are extremely exposed to attack.” The White House also released documents it said revealed “evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan.”
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The White House website to access declassified documents on the alleged plots temporarily crashed when people attempted to enter the site. The New York Times reported that voter files Trump said were acquired by China are “publicly available records.” An October 2020 memorandum prepared by the national intelligence officer for cyber and director of national intelligence found “a pro-China influence network on U.S. social media platforms posted messages supporting Beijing’s views that included some English-language content denigrating the President and his Administration’s policies.”
They concluded that “the activities of these networks are consistent with what we would expect to see from intelligence services or similar actors taking steps to build nascent online influence capabilities.” The memo noted that the U.S. “cannot” actually “directly tie this network to the Chinese Government,” concluding that Chinese people may have taken “low level exploratory steps to undermine” Trump in 2020 but that those efforts were not carried out under the direction of the Chinese government itself.
Trump critics noted similarities between the allegations made by the president and those made by Hillary Clinton during the Russiagate scandal, labeling Trump’s allegations as “Chinagate.”
