United States President Donald Trump declassified intelligence on Thursday (Jul 16) that he said showed Chinese interference in US elections, reviving his long-running attacks on election security despite a US intelligence assessment that found no evidence Beijing altered the 2020 vote, which he lost.<\/p>\n
The 25-minute prime-time address underscored Trump’s effort to make election security a central political issue ahead of November’s midterm elections, when his fellow Republicans will be defending their slender congressional majorities.<\/p>\n
Trump used his remarks to again press Republicans in Congress to pass legislation imposing new voter identification and citizenship requirements, despite longstanding findings that voter fraud in US elections is rare.<\/p>\n
The Bill has stalled in the Senate amid fierce Democratic opposition.<\/p>\n
Trump said the declassified documents would reveal “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure”.<\/p>\n
But many appeared to show the opposite, or were not related to US election infrastructure at all.<\/p>\n
The speech came at a challenging political moment for Trump and Republicans, with his approval rating weighed down by the unpopular Iran war and high energy prices.<\/p>\n
Trump only briefly mentioned the war at the outset, saying the US was “winning big”, while listing a series of domestic accomplishments, including tax cuts and his immigration crackdown, before turning to election security.<\/p>\n
The president 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.<\/p>\n
He asserted that members of the US intelligence community deliberately suppressed information about the extent of China’s activities.<\/p>\n
His allegations contradict an unclassified 2021 US 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.<\/p>\n
The assessment was conducted under John Ratcliffe, then Trump’s director of national intelligence and now his CIA director.<\/p>\n
The report also found China had pursued an effort dating to at least 2008 to collect information on US voters, public opinion, political parties, candidates and top government officials, likely aiming to use the material to predict election results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
United States President Donald Trump declassified intelligence on Thursday (Jul 16) that he said showed Chinese interference in US elections, reviving his long-running attacks on election security despite a US intelligence assessment that found no evidence Beijing altered the 2020 vote, which he lost. The 25-minute prime-time address underscored Trump’s effort to make election security a central political issue ahead of November’s midterm elections, when his fellow Republicans will be defending their slender congressional majorities. Trump used his remarks to again press Republicans in Congress to pass legislation imposing new<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":24981,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25979,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25978\/revisions\/25979"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/USBnews24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}