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Vice President Mike Pence made plans to visit Wisconsin after Joe Biden opted out of traveling there for the convention. Democrats called for an audit of the Postal Service’s new policies, citing concerns about potential mail-in voting issues.
This briefing has ended. Follow our latest coverage of the Biden vs. Trump 2020 election here.
Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr., American intelligence officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow continues to try to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.
At the same time, the officials said China preferred that Mr. Trump be defeated in November and was weighing whether to take more aggressive action in the election.
Those conclusions were included in a statement released by William R. Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.
But officials briefed on the intelligence said that Russia was the far graver, and more immediate, threat. While China seeks to gain influence in American politics, its leaders have not yet decided to wade directly into the presidential contest, however much they may dislike Mr. Trump, the officials said.
The assessment by Mr. Evanina suggested the intelligence community was treading carefully, reflecting the political heat generated by previous findings: The White House has objected to conclusions that Moscow is working to help Mr. Trump, and Democrats on Capitol Hill have expressed concern that the intelligence agencies are not being forthright enough about Russia’s preference for him and that the agencies are introducing China’s anti-Trump stance to balance the scales.
Democrats see the interference campaign run by Russia as a far more direct and urgent threat.
“The fact that adversaries like China or Iran don’t like an American president’s policies is normal fare. What’s abnormal, disturbing and dangerous is that an adversary like Russia is actively trying to get a Trump re-elected,” said Jeremy Bash, a former Obama administration official.
Russia tried to use influence campaigns during the 2018 midterm voting to try and sway public opinion, but did not successfully tamper with voting infrastructure.
Mr. Evanina said it would be difficult for adversarial countries to try to manipulate voting results on a large scale. But nevertheless, the countries could try to interfere in the voting process or take steps aimed at “calling into question the validity of the election results.”
For all the attention it gets, the vice-presidential choice has usually proved of little significance to the outcome of an election. But as Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, draws closer to naming his running mate, some party leaders think his selection could prove particularly meaningful this time.
Mr. Trump has struggled to find a line of attack that works against Mr. Biden. But depending on whom Mr. Biden chooses, Mr. Trump might be able to make this contest not about his Democratic challenger but about the No. 2 person on the ticket.
That is why questions about the history of one of the front-runners for the position, Representative Karen Bass of California, have such resonance. The Trump campaign has already seized on her trips to Cuba as a young activist and her 2010 appearance at the opening of the Church of Scientology headquarters in Los Angeles.
“Biden has been a frustratingly elusive target for Trump because Biden does not sound, look or feel like the ‘radical left,’” David Axelrod, who was President Barack Obama’s senior strategist, said in an email. “So Trump is hoping to depict Biden as a Trojan Horse and the running mate as the radical-in-waiting.”
Many Democrats assume much of this anti-Bass research was unearthed and distributed by one of her rivals; that would hardly be unusual in American politics. Where it came from may not be relevant: The Trump campaign would probably have uncovered it soon enough.
First, Mr. Biden was going to name a running mate around Aug. 1. Then he publicly floated another timeline, the end of the first week of August, but an aide confirmed that an announcement would not happen this week.
Even as the political world awaits his decision and donors are readying finance events featuring the still-unnamed running mate — “date and time to be announced” — Mr. Biden himself has not appeared to be in a big rush.
This comes as no surprise to those who know him well. Throughout his career, on issues large and small, Mr. Biden has shown himself to be openly meditative, with a penchant for missing his own deadlines as he mulls his options.
Ahead of the 2004 and 2016 presidential races, he deliberated extensively about whether to run before deciding against it. Last year, as Mr. Biden grappled again with the question, he missed one self-imposed deadline before finally joining the race. On a different scale, he is often late to his own events, lingers on rope lines and phone calls, and has been slow to formulate responses during several pivotal moments of the 2020 contest.
Mr. Biden’s habit of pushing deadlines leaves some Democrats anxious and annoyed, while others say it brings him to a well-considered decision, eventually.
Mr. Biden is now expected to name his vice-presidential choice shortly before the Democratic convention, which begins Aug. 17. While that is in keeping with the timeline of the two previous Democratic nominees, it is at odds with Mr. Biden’s own words.
“The deadline for a V.P. nomination is the convention,” said Representative Cedric Richmond, a co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s campaign. “He’s very deliberative with his decision-making. It works.”
When Vice President Mike Pence heard that Mr. Biden had scrapped his trip to Milwaukee to accept the Democratic presidential nomination, he saw an opportunity.
Mr. Pence and the Trump campaign had already scheduled a political event for the vice president in Wisconsin on Aug. 19, according to two administration officials, an attempt to fill a void they thought Mr. Biden was leaving in the battleground state.
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