Trump accused China of stealing US voter data
Kyiv • UNN
Trump claimed that China bought, stole or hacked tens of millions of voter documents. US intelligence believes the data was collected for influence campaigns, not election fraud.
US President Donald Trump, in an address to the nation, described a series of allegations of interference in the 2020 election. He claimed that China bought, stole, or hacked tens of millions of documents with voter data in 18 states of the country. And he lashed out at a conspiracy of the "deep state," which, he said, was aimed at suppressing this information, UNN reports citing The New York Times.
Details
"Yet those responsible for raising the alarm instead kept the information secret and concealed it. They did not disclose it to me as president or to anyone else, and as far as we know, they did not report it to Congress," Trump said.
As the publication notes, "indeed, the documents show fierce debate among intelligence officials about alerting their superiors."
However, the publication points out, U.S. intelligence agencies and members of Congress have long known that China obtained voter data — publicly available information often purchased by political campaigns. Moreover, as former intelligence officials stated, China collected this data not to manipulate voting results, but to more effectively plan influence campaigns aimed at shaping voters' public opinion, the publication writes.
Although the documents describe some nascent interest by Chinese officials in influence operations, they contain an admission that Beijing never approved any large-scale efforts to undermine Trump's positions, the publication notes.
Trump also mentioned a report on Venezuela, which shows that it can successfully falsify voting results.
John Solomon, who heads Trump's task force on declassifying documents on a range of issues, told reporters outside the White House that the intelligence community documents contain no evidence that votes at polling stations were altered in the last three elections.
And what about Russia?
Criticism of FBI and other intelligence agency investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election is one of Trump's favorite topics, the publication notes. "And in 2020, most intelligence officials assessed the Russian campaign to discredit Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the most extensive. (At the time, John Ratcliffe, then director of national intelligence, disagreed with this view and argued that career intelligence officials downplayed China's efforts)," the publication states.
"Yet Trump barely mentioned Russia in his speech on Thursday, most of which was devoted to complaining about China's attempts to vilify him," the publication points out.
Trump's approach to Russia, the publication notes, has long been to treat Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin as an equal, and his Justice Department is currently continuing to investigate a possible "grand conspiracy" by Democrats to link the president to Russia.
"Trump seemed to hint at such a conspiracy with an illogical addition about burn bags used to destroy government documents no longer needed for retention, and former President Barack Obama," the publication writes.