China has stepped up its efforts to try to interfere in the 2022 US midterm elections because Beijing was not worried about retaliation from President Joe Biden’s administration, according to a recently declassified US intelligence report.
The largely redacted reportwhich was conducted in December 2022 for the National Intelligence Council and released this week, said the Chinese government “tacitly approved efforts” to influence several U.S. midterm elections last year.
Chinese leaders, the report said, “repeatedly” ordered officials to focus on the U.S. Congress because Beijing “believes that Congress is a venue for anti-China activity, leading to a slowdown in bilateral relations and more aggressively threatening China’s core interests. “
Since 2020, senior Chinese leaders have issued “general directives” to intensify operations aimed at shaping U.S. policy and public opinion in favor of China, the report said.
The U.S. intelligence community determined that these orders gave Chinese influence actors “more freedom to operate ahead of the midterm elections than the 2020 presidential election, likely because PRC (People’s Republic of China) officials China) believed that Beijing was under less scrutiny during the midterm elections and because they did not expect the current administration to retaliate as harshly as they feared in 2020,” the report said.
The Chinese government “almost certainly” saw the 2022 US midterm elections as an opportunity to “present the US democratic model as chaotic, ineffective and unrepresentative, and has frequently skewed the PRC’s messaging to highlight the American divisions on social issues, such as abortion and gun control. “, the report said.
According to the intelligence report, Chinese officials identified specific members of Congress “to punish their anti-China views and to reward their perceived support for Beijing.”
These activities included “the covert online denigration of an appointed U.S. senator using inauthentic accounts,” according to the report. No U.S. senator’s name is left out of the report.
Nonetheless, the report said, the U.S. intelligence community found that Chinese leaders “refrained from authorizing a comprehensive campaign” aimed at influencing the midterm elections in favor of any U.S. political party or challenging the legitimacy of the election results.
“Chinese officials almost certainly viewed the risks of such efforts as greater than the rewards, as they were wary of revealing their influence efforts in the United States, did not want to become involved in American politics, and concluded “Congress would remain adversary of Beijing. regardless of which party is in power,” the report said.
Additionally, according to the report, Iran, Russia and Cuba also attempted to interfere in the 2022 midterm elections.
Attempts by foreign governments to interfere with the 2022 midterm elections “exceeded” what the U.S. intelligence community detected during the previous midterm elections in 2018, the report said.
Russia and, to a “lesser extent,” Iran “aimed to increase existing general sociopolitical tensions in the United States and sow distrust in democratic processes through online information operations ”, according to the report.
The report notes that the intelligence community “has not observed persistent cyber efforts by foreign governments to access and tamper with U.S. election infrastructure” since. Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
