President Donald Trump said Tuesday that China’s alleged election meddling in the 2020 election, a key topic of his prime-time speech last week, “took place a long time ago,” adding that “we do things to them, too.”
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The president was asked in the Oval Office whether he planned to put pressure on Chinese authorities over the allegations that he made Thursday without providing evidence.
“Well, we’re going to talk to them about it,” Trump said. “I think China is maybe a little bit different today than it was then. But look, they do things and we do things to them, I’ll be honest. We do things to them, too. It’s not a one-way street.”
In his East Room address last week, the president flagged vulnerabilities in the U.S. election infrastructure without saying they had been exploited. He said China made an “illicit” acquisition of U.S. voter files, containing information that included names, addresses, phone numbers and party affiliations — all of which is publicly available.
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There is no evidence or intelligence that the Chinese government hacked or compromised state voter registration systems in 2020, two former senior U.S. officials said last week.
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