Sen. Warner: ‘Trump intends to interfere in this year’s elections … This was the opening shot’

President Donald Trump made many spurious allegations in his Thursday night speech, with claims that there were serious attempts from China to interfere in the 2020 election. 

However, on Face the Nation Sunday, Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said the real reason for Trump’s speech was to signal the president’s own intentions to interfere with November midterms.

“Why is he doing all these things? I believe it’s because Donald Trump intends to interfere in this year’s elections,” said Warner in an interview with Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan. “He knows if there is a free and fair election, his policies will be rejected at record levels.”

The most obvious question from Trump’s speech is: If the 2020 election was interfered with, why didn’t his administration report it back then? Trump’s answer Thursday night was that the intelligence community back then “did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else” any information regarding this.

However, as Warner pointed out, one of Trump’s senior intelligence officials from 2020 continues to serve in the Trump administration today. During Trump’s first term, John Ratcliffe was the director of national intelligence. Currently, he serves as Trump’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Face the Nation also spoke with David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a leading election expert, who said that plenty of intelligence on possible foreign interference was shared with the president*. He just didn’t read it.

Much of that intelligence was about China’s intentions to influence the elections by bribing journalists and swaying the public, said Becker. These are all strategies he said other nations have employed for decades, and more aggressively by countries such as Russia and Iran.

“There was an honest debate and discussion across the intelligence community about what China’s intentions were, but their efforts were principally limited to influencing the American public, seeking to pay journalists,” said Becker. 

“It was an influence operation, and they have been doing that stuff since the early 2000s. This is not new. They did turn up the heat, and they are still doing it today. We have a significant and serious counterintelligence and counterespionage problem with China, and that’s what I really want to see us talking about: What are they doing today?”

Becker spoke with Democracy Docket after Trump’s Thursday speech, addressing the president’s claims that China intercepted tens of millions of voter registration data records from the 2020 election. He pointed out that such data is readily available online from the states.

“Everyone has this data,” Becker told Democracy Docket. “The administration really seems to misunderstand what you can do with this data. I could have a list of all the students at a particular university. That doesn’t mean I can change their grades.”

Sen. Warner indicated that Trump’s speech Thursday night was less about uncovering another country’s plot to overthrow American elections, but about Trump’s own plot to overthrow the democratic process.

“I think that what we just saw was, this was the opening shot of trying to undermine Americans’ confidence that their votes will actually be counted,” said Warner on Face the Nation. “He’s not ruled out bringing ICE to the polls. He’s not even ruled out the idea of trying to bar certain voting machines.”

* This story originally reported incorrectly that David Becker was fired as the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) during Trump’s first term. In fact, Becker has never worked for CISA. We regret the error.