(CNN) — Ordinarily, a claim like the one President Donald Trump leveled at China in prime time this week might herald a major rupture in ties with Beijing.
“The People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history,” Trump declared Thursday from the East Room, sounding personally stung that, according to a minority view of intelligence, the country had tried to undermine his election chances in 2020.
“The Chinese government wanted (the) US president to lose the next election,” he claimed. “The reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them, charged them billions and billions of dollars worth of tariffs, and built the strongest military anywhere in the world.”
The assertions were serious — if neither new nor entirely backed with evidence — and drew immediate indignation from Chinese officials. Yet they were not accompanied in Trump’s speech by any suggestion he planned to punish the Chinese government for its alleged actions.
By the next day, a White House official said planning for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s lavish state visit to Washington in two months was continuing apace. They offered no answer when asked whether Trump planned any repercussions for China in response to what he claimed was a data breach of historic scale.
And Trump, speaking at a World Cup reception in New York, mused that the next time the US hosts the tournament, it should bypass its current North American co-hosts and partner with Beijing instead.
“We do China, United States. So you have a short flight in between games. The players would love that,” he said, crediting the idea to FIFA head Gianni Infantino. He didn’t mention his election claims.
It was a different story for American intelligence officials who Trump alleged had withheld the China information from him during his first term. He tasked four separate federal agencies with investigating, instructing them “to fire those involved in the cover-up, and to file criminal charges, if appropriate, against these people.”
The difference in approach laid bare Trump’s fixation on re-litigating the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden. But it was also evidence he has little interest in upending what has become a fragile balance with Xi after a fraught first year back in office.
In some ways, Trump’s speech Thursday marked a departure from the tone he has struck in recent months toward China and its leader, with whom he has worked to cultivate personal ties over the course of several in-person meetings.
“I’m a big fan of President Xi,” Trump said at last week’s NATO summit in Turkey, praising the country for mostly staying on the sidelines of the war in Iran, despite fears early in the war that Beijing could provide Tehran with military assistance.
After Trump levied his election accusations on Thursday night, China’s foreign ministry responded by saying they had “no factual ground.”
“China adheres to the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs. We have no interest in interfering in the US elections and have never done so,” spokesperson Lin Jian said, offering criticism of the US and alluding to the negative impact of the claims could have on US-China ties. “We urge the US to reflect on its own behavior, stop unwanted vilification of China … and act more in ways conducive to China-US relations.”
Stabilizing ties has been a priority for Trump’s administration recently after a bruising year of tariff standoffs. Xi hosted Trump for a pomp-filled state visit to Beijing in May, and the two leaders plan to meet again in Washington in late September.
Trump has also suggested he may return to China this year for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November in Shenzhen. And Xi could visit the United States for the Group of 20 summit Trump is hosting in Miami.
In all of his engagements with Xi over the past year, Trump has never made public mention of Chinese attempts at hacking US infrastructure, let alone sensitive election data.
That’s despite the FBI cyber experts investigating multiple sophisticated Chinese cyber espionage campaigns aimed at US government and corporate secrets.
The documents the Trump administration released on Thursday, while lacking any evidence for major election fraud or efforts to change votes, did reinforce just how voracious Chinese intelligence services have been in collecting information on Americans, and provided fresh evidence of the lengths that Chinese hackers allegedly went to spy on senior US government officials and the 2020 presidential campaign of Joe Biden.
One Chinese hacking group was using techniques to track the email accounts of Biden campaign staffers, suggesting that “the Chinese operators are mapping out the target network for follow-on approaches, possibly including tasking campaign staffers’ e-mail accounts in the Chinese military’s signals intelligence system for collection,” one declassified intelligence report says.
Other reports in the collection of documents assert that Chinese government actors have been downloading voter registration information in numerous states. In some cases, the information was already publicly available. And there is no mention of China actively exploiting the data on voters it collected or stole, nor that they accessed systems in a way that would allow them to change people’s votes.
The documents paint a picture of Chinese intelligence services that are collecting just about any information they can on hundreds of millions of Americans.
That, in the aggregate, is not a new revelation. Between the 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management and subsequent hacks of American health care providers and other companies, US intelligence officials have long warned that Chinese spies have a detailed picture of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of Americans. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in 2024 that the US had seen evidence of Chinese attempts to “influence and arguably interfere” with the upcoming US elections, despite an earlier commitment from leader Xi Jinping not to do so.
The US has in the past applied targeted financial sanctions and sought criminal indictments of state-sponsored Chinese hackers.
But a day after Trump claimed the Chinese government had obtained 220 million US voter files, leading to an “unprecedented election security nightmare,” there was little to indicate he planned similar punishment.
The-CNN-Wire
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