WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump claims that China is responsible for the biggest case of hacking in relation to the 2020 United States presidential election, stating that Beijing stole 220 million American voter files during his primetime speech from the White House. Trump made the announcement in a speech last Thursday.
Allegations of Interference by China
Trump alleges that China had been constantly election data theft and attempting to hack into election data, which is termed by him as “an unprecedented election security nightmare.” The breached data included the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and affiliation to a particular political party of voters among other personal data which could have been used for voter fraud or other criminal acts.
Citing what he termed the results of a White House task force evaluation and findings made by the intelligence advisory board of the president, Trump indicated that “China conducted what is likely the most massive assault on our election infrastructure in our history.” He added that the documents that have been released on Thursday, which can now be accessed through the government’s website, point to how the “deep state” sought to bury this information.
Claims of Cover-Up of Intelligence Officers
While Trump makes accusations about China election data theft, he makes further allegations that the intelligence officers of the US deliberately kept him in the dark about the issue. This, according to him, was done not only against him but also against Congress and others who could act on the information.
Payments to American Journalists
Apart from the accusations concerning the voter data, President Trump has accused China of trying to offer payments to American journalists in order to report negatively on him. The claim was that the Chinese authorities tried to locate those journalists who had been writing negative stories about him before and offering them large sums of money to write whatever negative story they could think of regardless of their accuracy.
The above-mentioned allegations were only some of the parts of the larger story that President Trump tried to tell.
Denial by China
Before Trump gave his address, a denial of the accusations was made by the Chinese Embassy in Washington. According to the spokesperson of the embassy, Liu Chang, China has never meddled in any US presidential elections nor does it intend to do so, and therefore, any accusation linking the Chinese government with stealing voter information or manipulating the elections can be dismissed.
Reports about Trump’s speech independently pointed out that voter information is freely available on official state websites and access to publicly available data is not an enabling factor for election tampering or vote manipulation. The reports also said that the materials used did not have any allegation of vote manipulation or hacking of voting machines in the 2020 election.
Fragility of US Election System Pointed Out by Trump
In the same speech, Trump criticizes the overall US electoral system for being fragile. He states that the system is still fragile because there is the risk of hacking into electronic voting machines as well as counting votes. As an ardent supporter of reverting to the use of paper ballots, Trump referred to the alleged intelligence report suggesting that Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other non-state players have the capacity to influence American elections.
In addition to making references about the elections and democracy issues, Trump used the address to talk about his administration’s policies abroad. He explained that the US military had been rebuilt into what he considers to be the strongest in the world, while he noted “great success” in Iran without explaining in detail what the success was. He further mentioned that America is engaged in Venezuela, which is now producing a lot of oil thanks to the joint efforts of both countries, referring to the attack on Venezuela on January 3.
The accusations made by Trump come in light of previous intelligence assessments of the issue. A 2020 intelligence report, which was declassified a few years ago, found out that China had accessed the voter registrations of many states, supposedly to do public opinion analysis but not election interference. It was observed in some of the news sources reporting Thursday’s speech that previous accusations of Chinese election interference had been investigated by US intelligence agencies.
Nayab Fatima is a media professional specializing in fact-based journalism, research, and analytical reporting on technology, telecom, aviation, and automobiles.
