Last night President Turmp went all in to push for the Save America Act, a bill which would require photo ID and proof of citizenship when voting. Trump's case for the bill involved declassifying some documents which he said showed that our election system was vulnerable to meddling by foreign actors.
President Donald Trump addressed the nation Thursday evening on "free and fair" elections, announcing the declassification of critical intelligence that reveals, as he said, "shocking vulnerabilities" related to "hacking, exploitation and foreign interference."
"This vital information is for many years been covered up and hidden from you," Trump said. "The American people are beautiful, our great American people. But that all changes right now."
Trump did not claim China changed votes or altered election results. Instead, he argued Beijing engaged in an influence campaign aimed at shaping U.S. public perceptions.
The heavily redacted documents were released on the White House website and fell into several categories. The first was about China collecting election data, some of which was apparently downloaded from public sites.
He accused China of an “illicit” acquisition of U.S. voter files including names, addresses, phone number and party affiliation — all of which is publicly available information. There is no evidence or intelligence that the Chinese government hacked or compromised state voter registration systems in 2020, two former senior U.S. officials said.
Nevertheless, the documents indicate that China had collected millions of records on US voter information. Trump said that US agencies were aware China may have wanted to interfere in our elections but said that information was kept out of briefings when he was president.
Much of the speech focused on intelligence reports that Trump said were withheld from him as president and from the public in 2020. He asserted the reports indicated China wanted to undermine Trump’s reelection, although he did not claim that China took any steps to manipulate the election results.
Raw intelligence reports are often wrong, incomplete or contradictory, and spy agencies rely on judgments by expert analysts to vet and piece together the information to make conclusions with different levels of confidence. Officials in 2020 disagreed about whether China wanted Trump to lose and about whether Beijing took any steps to undermine him — a controversy noted in a declassified 2021 report. That report described consensus on the conclusion that neither China nor any other foreign actors had tampered with any votes...
An undated CIA report, based on sensitive intelligence gathered from 2018 to 2020, said the Beijing government wanted Trump “to lose the next election.” But it described China using political and economic influence, not election hacking.
The NY Times says the opinion about China's interest in meddling was the view of a particular cyber intelligence official named Chris Porter.
Chris Porter, who was not identified in the documents, wrote a series of classified memos on the matter. He made the case that “Beijing has taken at least some low-level, exploratory steps” to undermine Mr. Trump’s chances of being re-elected in his 2020 race against Joseph R. Biden Jr...
In his first declassified memo, from Oct. 16, 2020, Mr. Porter said that he and the other intelligence official assessed Beijing’s efforts at influence “probably included overt messaging, nascent online covert influence capabilities” as well as diplomatic and economic leverage...
In another section, the file says China was experimenting with creating deepfakes — manipulated images and videos — to denigrate Mr. Trump. Due to redactions, it is unclear whether China did anything more than experiment.
But the dissenting intelligence officers noted that Chinese government had used Chinese organizations to incite protests in the U.S. to undermine Mr. Trump’s re-election chances and that pro-China influence network had posted messaging denigrating the administration.
The media response to this information couldn't be more different from their handling of the Steele dossier. Back then, any news about Trump's interactions with Russia were framed in the most hostile and suspicious light, even when they lacked any evidence to support them. Now efforts by China to collect our data and consider how undermine the president is treated as a minor side-story. Here's how the Times' story ends:
...in January 2022, actors aligned with the Chinese government obtained public voter registration data from Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma and Rhode Island and unsuccessfully tried to download a voter registration application from Ohio.
Such information, the report said, could be useful in hacking efforts against those voters or election influence operations. But the report conceded: “The actual motivations for collecting this information is unknown.”
Sure, the motives aren't known but what are the chances they're innocent? We're talking about the world's largest and most powerful authoritarian state. Given China's long history of hacking and stealing U.S. data, It's probably safe to assume they weren't collecting the voter data for our benefit.
Here's the full address by President Trump. If you're interested in downloading the documents he released, they can be found here.
Editor’s Note: Republicans are fighting for election integrity by requiring proper identification to vote.
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