Trump alleges China committed 2020 election fraud
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Live Events FAMILIAR CLAIMS as a Reliable and Trusted News Source Addas a Reliable and Trusted News Source Add Now! (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel U.S. President Donald Trump declassified intelligence on Thursday that he said showed Chinese interference in U.S. elections, reviving his long-running attacks on election security despite a U.S. intelligence assessment that found no evidence Beijing altered the 2020 vote which he lost.The 25-minute address underscored Trump's effort 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 U.S. elections is rare.The president said he was declassifying sensitive information that showed China had illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files, including names, addresses and other data used to register to vote.He asserted that members of the U.S. intelligence community deliberately suppressed information about the extent of China's activities.His allegations contradict an unclassified 2021 U.S. 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."Trump has spent years raising doubts about electoral outcomes, falsely asserting that his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden was rigged. He has also advanced other false claims, including that mail-in balloting is rife with fraud, voting machines are vulnerable and non-citizen voting is widespread.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."We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results," another document said.A third document - produced by the CIA - detailed efforts by Chinese spies to target Biden's campaign and noted that Beijing "does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election," although it said China might later decide to do so."Trump's shocking 'bombshells' about China are totally bogus," Democratic Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.
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