A Few Intelligence Nuggets Emerge in Newly Released Documents
China stepped up espionage, hacked Biden campaign, but didn’t engage in 2020 election interference, despite Trump claims. (Russia did—again.)
Barack Obama was stunned.
“You got to be kidding me!” the then-U.S. senator from Illinois said when he was told, in the summer of 2008, that his presidential campaign, and that of his rival, John McCain, had been hacked by a foreign “entity.”
The cyber heist of both campaigns’ computer systems was first reported by Newsweek that fall in a special post-election edition and was considered a significant, and somewhat spooky, revelation at the time.
But it wasn’t until five years later that I confirmed what was widely suspected from the outset: the hacks came from cyber warriors associated with the People’s Republic of China—the culprits in what Dennis Blair, Obama’s first director of national intelligence, called a “case of political cyberespionage by the Chinese government against the two American political parties.”
As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The long ago 2008 cyber attack has taken on new relevance in light of President Trump’s much hyped speech Thursday night revealing that the Chinese had actually stepped up their election espionage game since then, hacking into and acquiring voter registration records on more than 220 million Americans, including names, addresses, phone numbers and party affiliation during the 2000 presidential campaign between him and Joe Biden.
That, and much more, was revealed in a cache of newly declassified intelligence documents released on the White House website as Trump was delivering yet another baseless attack on elections security.
