By Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay and Phil Stewart
WASHINGTON, July 15 (Reuters) - The White House is considering releasing sensitive intelligence related to China and its ability to interfere in U.S. elections that some Trump officials worry could be misleading, according to four people with knowledge of the deliberations.
Trump may disclose the intelligence, which was collected and analyzed during his first term, in a speech that he is due to deliver on Thursday night, when he is expected to outline information about alleged vulnerabilities in the voting infrastructure that could allow for foreign interference in U.S. elections, the sources said.
Reuters could not determine the details of the intelligence, but sources said it is classified and related to whether China had the intention or ability to disrupt U.S. elections in 2020. The sources, who were granted anonymity to discuss classified material, said the intelligence did not show Beijing had manipulated or changed votes.
Trump has continued to repeat the debunked claim that the 2020 election was rigged, suggesting a foreign actor was involved in flipping votes despite legal rulings that Democrat Joe Biden won.
His speech on Thursday may reveal new information about a year-long effort by the Trump administration to collect and review material on what the White House says are vulnerabilities in the nation’s voting infrastructure.
The effort is part of a wider campaign to exert federal control over the administration of U.S. elections — a role that rests solely with the states under the U.S. Constitution.
“As usual, anonymous sources are speculating about what President Trump will say during his speech on Thursday evening. The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for comment. The CIA declined to comment.
NO EVIDENCE CHINA MANIPULATED VOTES
The China intelligence was integral to the first Trump administration’s debate about foreign interference in the 2020 election and was reviewed as part of the official intelligence community’s assessment on the issue, the four sources said.
Trump officials said publicly during the first administration that Chinese hackers were targeting election infrastructure ahead of the 2020 election.
Former officials have repeatedly said there is no evidence to suggest China or any other foreign adversary manipulated votes in 2020. A 2021 U.S. intelligence community assessment found no indications that any foreign actor attempted or succeeded in altering “any technical aspect” of the 2020 presidential election vote, including voter registrations, ballots, tabulations or results.
But former intelligence analysts, including Christopher Porter, who served as a national intelligence officer on cyber at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, wrote a dissent to that report, saying China had the ability to interfere in the elections and could be trying to do so.
A version of that dissent was included in the public release of the 2021 intelligence community assessment.
Porter also wrote a highly classified paper on the subject, expanding on his original argument, two sources said.
Two of the sources who reviewed the paper described it as detailed, outlining specific details of Beijing’s thinking on U.S. elections. Two others said the paper pulled from a small subset of raw intelligence and did not necessarily represent Beijing’s official viewpoint.
Porter has since publicly accused the intelligence community of covering up his dissent reports during Trump’s first term.
Porter declined to comment.
The sources expressed concern that the Trump administration could exaggerate the significance of Porter’s dissent and use it to argue that China did have influence over the outcome of the 2020 vote.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
DEBATE OVER DECLASSIFICATION
Current Trump officials have debated in recent weeks whether to declassify the intelligence, with some inside the intelligence agencies worried that doing so could reveal sources and methods of collection and insinuate that Beijing successfully interfered in past elections, two of the sources said.
A White House task force led by conservative journalist John Solomon recently asked the intelligence community for documents outlining the intelligence and has spent the past several weeks reviewing them in anticipation of Trump’s speech, one source familiar with the group’s work said.
The White House did not respond to questions about Solomon’s efforts.
The text of the speech has not been finalized and may still change, the source said.
The White House may also release information related to a years-old allegation that China gained access to U.S. voter data in 2020, a source familiar with the White House’s debates said.
Two people familiar with that issue said that voter data is not confidential, is already available to political consultants for use in targeting election materials, and cannot be manipulated.
The Trump and Biden administrations both reviewed intelligence about China’s potential access to voter data, but two former officials said the intelligence community largely believed that China did not gain entry to U.S. voter systems but instead accessed the information online.
(Reporting by Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay and Phil Stewart; Additional reporting by Nandita Bose; Editing by Don Durfee and Daniel Wallis)
