The FBI and cybersecurity experts agree that China is getting more aggressive with its influence campaigns, including the Chinese government’s targeting of the midterm elections.
The intelligence community concluded Russia worked to hurt now-President Joe Biden and that Iran worked to undermine then-President Donald Trump in 2020, but there was disagreement within spy agencies about whether China sat on the sidelines or took steps to harm Trump’s reelection. The FBI is now saying China has ramped up its election influence efforts in 2022.
The bureau conducted a briefing this month on the promise of anonymity in which the FBI discussed China, Russia, and Iran as the three main foreign election threats.
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The FBI repeatedly pointed to a Justice Department indictment in March in which prosecutors accused Chinese intelligence of attempting to undermine the congressional candidacy of Xiong Yan, a former Tiananmen Square protest leader-turned-retired U.S. Army chaplain, in a criminal harassment and intimidation scheme.
“That is a shift from what we’ve seen historically on the China side,” a senior FBI official said. “What we assess there, honestly, is that there are a subset of candidates that hit both the thresholds that really frustrates China regarding dissident perspectives and Beijing policy perspectives, and then the broader Chinese influence narratives and efforts which are generally to undermine … U.S. criticism of Beijing and its policies.”
A senior bureau official also said, “I think the shift that we’ve seen, the most significant shift that we are starting to identify observables on, is on the China side where they may be looking to pull a broader page out of the Russia playbook and look to continue to… do things like identify narratives that will exacerbate divisions.”
The cybersecurity firm Mandiant also released a report on a Chinese influence campaign dubbed “Dragonbridge” the outlet said it can “assess with high confidence to be operating in support of the political interests of the People’s Republic of China, aggressively targeting the United States by seeking to sow division both between the U.S. and its allies and within the U.S. political system itself.”
The firm said Dragonbridge’s recent narratives include “aggressive attempts to discredit the U.S. democratic process, including attempts to discourage Americans from voting” in the midterm elections.
Mandiant said the Chinese campaign’s “targeting of the U.S. political system through attempts to discourage Americans from voting shows a willingness to use increasingly aggressive rhetoric.”
The firm added: “Most notably, in September 2022, Dragonbridge accounts posted an English-language video across multiple platforms containing content attempting to discourage Americans from voting in the upcoming U.S. midterm elections.”
Sandra Joyce, the head of Mandiant’s global intelligence efforts, said that “what we’re seeing is a group that is getting more aggressive in their tactics, trying to scale up this operation, around the world.”
Joyce also revealed that “we’ve seen evidence that the Chinese government is sponsoring information operations discrediting democracy and due process in elections in the United States.”
Shane Huntley of Google’s Threat Analysis Group tweeted that the group agreed that Dragonbridge’s narratives “are getting more aggressive in blaming the U.S. for world events.”
It comes after FBI Director Christopher Wray said in July that “I think we’re concerned about the same usual suspects” ahead of the midterm elections, pointing to China, Russia, and Iran.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence report released in March 2021 said that “we assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election” in 2020.
But the report also indicated that a minority view from the national intelligence officer for cyber “assesses, however, that China did take some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection.”
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Barry Zulauf, an analytic ombudsman and longtime intelligence official, concluded that some U.S. intelligence analysts appeared to hold back information on Chinese interference efforts because they disagreed with the Trump administration’s policies.
Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe contended that “I do not believe the majority view expressed by the Intelligence Community analysts fully and accurately reflects the scope of the Chinese government’s efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections.”
