President Donald Trump accused China in his Thursday, July 16 Address to the Nation of interfering in the 2020 U.S. general election, while also raising concerns about grave “vulnerabilities” in the existing U.S. voting systems.
“Over a period of years starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history—resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files,” a White House in a memo on election integrity released on Thursday reads.
President Trump lost the 2020 presidential elections to Joe Biden amidst claims of voter fraud and foreign meddling. Thursday’s speech was made exactly three months before the midterm elections in November and Trump is pushing his fellow Republicans to pass stricter federal voting rules.
The president alleged that the U.S. intelligence agencies covered up Chinese efforts at manipulating the elections.
The White House memo said that China’s alleged acquisition of American voter information included names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other data that the Trump administration termed “sensitive” and which is required to register to vote.
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“This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare. The intelligence even shows that China assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project,” said the White House statement.
Ex-US Marine: China’s cyber and influence operations are well-documented
Grant Newsham, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy and Japan Forum for Strategic Studies, told Vision Times that the US intelligence community has “too often in the last couple decades proven themselves to be both incomplete and politicized. So it’s hard to have any confidence in its statements about elections and election interference.”
Newsham, a former U.S. Marine and a former reserve head of intelligence for Marine Forces Pacific, said that given Beijing is in an unprecedented geopolitical contest with America, it is not “too stupid or too uninterested” to not break in U.S. voting and ballot-counting machines.
He is the author of the book When China Attacks: A Warning to America.
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“As for the security of voting and counting machines: the U.S. government has admitted repeatedly that the Chinese have penetrated all U.S. critical infrastructure and Chinese hacking of our defense and industrial systems is well known,” he said.
Newsham emphasized that in 2020, when head of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Chris Krebs proclaimed that that year’s U.S. election was the most protected in U.S. history; the comments had come just two weeks after that American government computers were hit by a massive attack believed to be from China.
“One should have no confidence in pronouncements such as Krebs’ and other election interference deniers,” he said.
