There are primetime addresses and there are primetime addresses that cause the senator who chairs the Intelligence Committee to go on CBS the following morning and say he was “embarrassed that the president went before our country and networks like yours carried this as news as opposed to a rehash of falsehoods,” and Trump’s Thursday night speech claiming newly declassified intelligence proves China interfered in the 2020 presidential election produced the second kind.
Trump told the nation Thursday night that “newly released documents show CIA reporting explicitly stated, and I quote, in mid 2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S.” He added that intelligence officials had concealed this information. He announced the declassification of documents related to “vulnerabilities in election infrastructure.” He did this in a 25-minute primetime White House address that Fox News aired without interruption, per Fox News’s own video page. China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Friday morning: “China has never interfered and will not interfere in the U.S. elections. The so-called China interfering in U.S. elections is an entirely fabricated false proposition.” She added that “China reserves the right to take reciprocal countermeasures,” which is the diplomatic phrase for “we will respond to this in a way we have not specified.”
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CBS News Friday morning: “I was embarrassed that the president went before our country and networks like yours carried this as news as opposed to a rehash of falsehoods. It is incumbent upon you and any responsible journalist to pushback on this.” Warner, who chairs the committee that oversees the intelligence Trump says was concealed, is saying the declassified intelligence is not what Trump says it is. Trump, who has the declassified intelligence, says it is. Both men have access to the underlying material. They have reached opposite conclusions about it, which is the situation produced when a declassification announcement is made in a primetime speech that Democrats call a rehash of falsehoods and Republicans call a historic revelation.
The speech was billed Thursday as “the most important thing we’ve done,” which is the description Trump also gave the Iran ceasefire, the Freedom Fuel gas network, and the Freedom 250 Social Security cards for newborns, in a year where the most important thing has changed approximately monthly.
China was not invited to respond before the speech. China’s response arrived within nine hours.
When the president’s primetime speech produces China calling it fabricated, the Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat saying he was embarrassed it aired, and a threat of reciprocal countermeasures all before breakfast, what exactly was revealed?
Sources
Fox News: China dismisses Trump election interference accusations as ‘entirely fabricated’
HuffPost: Trump Revives Old Election Interference Claims
