A former spy official whose dissent from an intelligence community assessment contended China tried to influence the 2020 election to hurt former President Donald Trump’s reelection is continuing to warn of the problem heading into 2024.
The spy assessment, released in 2021, unanimously agreed Russia sought to hurt then-candidate Joe Biden while Iran worked to harm Trump but did not reach unanimity on China. The majority argued China didn’t try to influence the election, while a minority dissent contended that’s exactly what Beijing did.
Christopher Porter, the national intelligence officer for cyber in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2019 until this summer, was the named author of the minority stance, which was endorsed by then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. Porter became head of Google Cloud Threat Intelligence in June and continued banging the drum on LinkedIn about China’s 2020 influence.
“I appreciate all the messages of support from everyone following the takedown of Chinese (and Russian!) influence campaigns. It’s an important move, and their continued activity vindicates my concerns about the consequences of not standing up to their operations in 2020,” Porter wrote in October. “This is not, as some have interpreted it, the first Chinese network to target U.S. politics.”
The FBI argued in October it had recently seen a significant shift in China’s approach and that China was now attempting to influence U.S. elections, specifically the 2022 midterm elections.
But Porter posted: “This isn’t a new development, but the evolution of a cancer that went deliberately ignored.” As an example, he pointed to an August 2020 report from the research group Graphika: “Social media accounts from the pro-Chinese political spam network Spamouflage Dragon started posting English-language videos that attacked American policy and the [Trump] administration.”
“For China, improved translation and meme-ability could take these networks up in impact if left unaddressed,” Porter wrote. “None of that can be stopped until there’s a more honest reckoning with how their operations in 2020 were characterized, since that toolkit is the base on which they are building for 2022 and 2024.”
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“We knew at the time that history would prove we were right,” Ratcliffe told the Washington Examiner this week. “The more that comes to light publicly now, the more proof there is that China is doing exactly what we said they were doing two years ago.”
A senior FBI official said in October there had been “a shift from what we’ve seen historically on the China side.” A bureau official also said that “the most significant shift … is on the China side where they may be looking to pull a broader page out of the Russia playbook.”
The FBI cited a Justice Department indictment in March accusing Chinese intelligence of attempting to undermine the congressional candidacy of Xiong Yan, a former Tiananmen protest leader-turned-retired U.S. Army chaplain. China has a lengthy record of targeting Chinese dissidents and Chinese Americans in the U.S.
“There’s no big difference between what [China] did in 2020 and what they’re doing now,” Porter wrote in October. “The fact they are still playing in a mid-term suggests their underlying risk tolerance has risen — what does that mean for 2024 when more is at stake?”
Porter posted in November that “we can’t plan to counter future threats until we’re honest about what they tried (and largely failed) to do in 2020.”
The intelligence community’s majority view said in 2021 that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.”
But the report revealed Porter “assesses, however, that China did take some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection … primarily through social media and official public statements and media.”
The minority view “assesses that some of Beijing’s influence efforts were intended to at least indirectly affect U.S. candidates, political processes, and voter preferences.”
Barry Zulauf, an analytic ombudsman, issued a 2021 report in which he uncovered politicization related to the assessments on China in 2020.
“China analysts appeared hesitant to assess Chinese actions as undue influence or interference. The analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the [Trump] administration’s policies, saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies,” Zulauf concluded.
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Ratcliffe signed a letter at the time endorsing the minority view. He said, “I do not believe the majority view expressed by the intelligence community analysts fully and accurately reflects the scope of the Chinese government’s efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections.”
The ombudsman report, Ratcliffe wrote, “includes concerning revelations about the politicization of China election influence reporting.” Ratcliffe wrote that the majority view led to the “false impression that Russia sought to influence the election but China did not.”
“Within the intelligence community, there were groups of individuals who agreed with the NIO for Cyber about what China was doing. He was far from alone,” Ratcliffe told the Washington Examiner. “But there was an internal effort, not just according to me, according to the intelligence community ombudsman, to beat that down.”
ODNI declined to comment.
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Porter shared an article in November that revealed a Chinese effort targeting numerous candidates in Canada’s 2019 elections, and he said it made no sense to believe China would’ve meddled in Canadian elections in 2019 but not in the U.S. election in 2020.
“Trump was a part of it, but it’s also a cultural issue within the intelligence community,” Ratcliffe told the Washington Examiner when asked if he believed the intelligence community downplayed Chinese election influence in 2020 due to concerns about Trump or because of an inclination among analysts to view Russia as a bigger threat than China.