Is China trying to repeat Russia’s 2016 election meddling escapades, or isn’t it? With less than a week to go to the midterm Congressional elections, that’s the latest question in your nation’s capital.
Several times over the last few weeks, President Donald Trump has stated that the Chinese are indeed attempting to interfere. Most notably, in his remarks opening a September session of the U.N. Security Council, Trump said, “Regrettably, we found that China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election coming up in November against my administration. They do not want me, or us, to win because I am the first President ever to challenge China on trade. And we are winning on trade. We are winning at every level. We don’t want them to meddle or interfere in our upcoming election.”
As they do every time Trump says anything they haven’t heard before, a skeptical news media has appended their usual “Trump asserted without evidence” tag to the president’s claims. After all, everyone knows it’s Russia who interferes in elections, right?
Did the DHS Secretary undercut the president?
Critics pointed to a statement from Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as evidence that the government does not back up Trump’s claim. But look closely: she said there is “currently no indication that a foreign adversary intends to disrupt our election infrastructure.”
Infrastructure.
That is an oddly specific denial, especially since the Russians’ 2016 election meddling was largely in the information domain and not the cyber domain. Yes, there were attempts to infiltrate the voter registration systems in several states (although, to borrow the media’s phrase, there is no evidence they were successful). But in all the hand wringing over 2016, no one has come right out and said the Russians compromised the actual election infrastructure.
Election infrastructure would refer to the physical means of registering to vote, the maintenance of voter lists and electronic voting machines, and the methods for reporting and tallying votes from individual precincts. Infrastructure does not mean people yelling at each other on Twitter. It seems to me that answering a broad question in a narrow way is a method of dodging the issue. It’s an example of “answer the question you wish they’d asked rather than the question they actually asked.”
No one asked if the Chinese were trying to hack our election infrastructure, and that’s not what Trump said either.
Senate Democrats Demand Evidence
Some Senate Democrats have seized on Nielsen’s statement and demanded answers from the administration. A month ago, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Kamala Harris of California, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico wrote to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats asking if “the President’s statement is consistent with the assessments of the Intelligence Community.” Yesterday, they got their response. It was classified, top to bottom.
Needless to say, this did not sit well with the senators. In a typically hyperbolic Wyden statement, the senator said “there’s no excuse for the DNI to hide under his desk.” He added that the DNI “has an obligation to the American people to provide a public response to our questions, particularly since this is about America’s elections and the security of our democracy.”
Having not seen the classified letter, I can say what Wyden cannot: there’s little doubt that the DNI’s assessment supported the president’s assertions, and answering publicly would reveal sources and methods. There can now be no doubt the Chinese have been engaged in the same type of influence operations the Russians employed in 2016. After all, they have a lot at stake, and they’d be foolish not to try.
The fact that Facebook and Twitter have said they see no evidence of Chinese operations is meaningless. The People’s Liberation Army’s cyber capabilities are far more sophisticated than even the Russians, and they have the benefit of knowing how the Russians were detected two years ago. This employment of an offensive capability in the cyber domain short of outright conflict is exactly what we’ve been told to expect in the new era of great power competition.
Granted, the president’s habit of making false, exaggerated, and questionable statements invited the latest scrutiny. In this case, though, there’s absolutely no reason to doubt him.
