Trump revives China election interference claims before midterms
The President, who has long suggested his 2020 loss to Joe Biden was rigged, revived the conspiracy theory that China had interfered in the poll.
The US intelligence community insisted in an earlier assessment that Beijing did not alter the result of the 2020 election.
In a 25-minute address, Trump attempted to make election security a central political issue ahead of November’s midterm elections, when Republicans will be defending their congressional majorities and face the possibility of losing control of one or both chambers.
Trump has pressed his fellow Republicans in Congress to pass legislation imposing new voter identification and citizenship requirements, despite longstanding findings that voter fraud in American elections is rare.
Trump said he was declassifying sensitive information that showed China had illicitly acquired 220 million US voter files, including names, addresses and other data used to register to vote.
He asserted that members of the intelligence community deliberately suppressed information about the extent of China’s activities.
His allegations contradict an unclassified 2021 intelligence community assessment that found no indications any foreign actor attempted to alter or succeeded in altering "any technical aspect" of the 2020 presidential election vote, including voter registrations, ballots, tabulations or results.
The assessment was conducted under John Ratcliffe, then Trump’s director of national intelligence and now his CIA director.
Ahead of Trump’s speech, some White House officials expressed concern that disclosing the China information could be misleading, sources told Reuters.
Trump’s harsh language about China risked rocking a relationship that has steadied following last year’s costly trade war. Trump hopes to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in September about improving trade relations.
Before Trump began speaking, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy, Liu Chang, said in response to a request for comment, "China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S."
Numerous courts and vote recounts found no evidence of large-scale fraud in the 2020 election.
Trump also said he was declassifying data that would reveal "shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure."
But many of the documents appeared to show the opposite, or were not related to U.S. election infrastructure at all. One CIA document, prepared last month, concerned Venezuela’s election, not America’s.
World Affairs Correspondent
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