President Donald Trump on Thursday night publicly sought evaluation from his own FBI director as he deflected transparent evidence of Russian interference in the upcoming elections, saying China posed a “FAR risk greater than Russia, Russia, and Russia. “
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2020
The president tweeted the comments along with an excerpt from the testimony of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who made it clear to lawmakers Thursday that Russia is making “an effort to damage Biden’s campaign. “
Trump’s comments are the latest in his efforts to build around the theory that China is meddling in Biden’s election, while minimizing Russia’s well-documented history with Trump dating back to its first presidential candidacy in 2016.
Trump’s assessment gives Russia a slight popularity, but strongly implicates China “more than others” as the ultimate serious risk in an “electoral fraud” to manipulate elections.
The tweet seeks to question the legitimacy of the electoral procedure while undermining an official through the government’s head of counterintelligence, William Evanina, last month, who directly implicated Russia in the 2020 election interference by saying that he was actively running to denigrate Biden.
Wray’s testimony those assessments.
“In fact, we have noticed very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020 through what I would call more than an evil foreign influence,” Wray told the House National Security Committee Thursday morning, adding that Moscow’s main goal is to “denigrate” Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Last week, the president warned in a tweet that China interferes in the 2020 elections and seeks to undermine its chances of a momentary mandate by encouraging racial protests. At the time, he shared an article written through a Breitbart columnist whose claims go against formal evidence from Beijing’s threat intelligence community to date.
Attorney General Bill Barr, who supports the president’s outlandish statements, also made misleading statements about Russian interference in an interview with CNN earlier this month. When asked if Russia, China or Iran were the top authoritarian to interfere with the election, Barr supplemented Trump’s statement by saying, “I think it’s China. “
On a CNN on the city corridor in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, Biden rejected Trump’s message about China’s threats and said that while China is a “serious competitor,” he called Russia “an adversary. “
Biden added that if he were president and the intelligence network discovered Moscow’s electoral interference, Russia would “pay the price, and that would be an economic price. “