Communist China declared war on Trump in 2018. Why wouldn’t they interfere in the 2020 election?

(LifeSiteNews) — In 2018, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a strategic decision: Donald Trump had to be weakened, contained, or removed from power. This was not a reaction to one single tariff or tweet. It was a calculated response to the first president to break with decades of bipartisan coddling of Beijing.

From Nixon on, China had been treated by the U.S. as a partner to be managed. Trump saw it for what it was: an increasingly dangerous adversary. His agenda — aggressive tariffs, technology export controls, supply chain decoupling, support for Taiwan, and direct criticism of the CCP — was deliberately designed to choke off the easy access to American capital, technology and markets that had powered China’s rise. More broadly, it was intended to throttle the party’s global ambitions and preserve American primacy.

China threw everything they had — from classic influence tactics to modern tools of information warfare — at the upstart American, who had come out of nowhere to defeat their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton. They deployed united front organizations, business lobbies, and diaspora groups to create anti-Trump sentiment in corporate America and the corridors of power in Washington. They found ways to reward academics, think tanks, and media figures willing to criticize Trump’s China policy as reckless or xenophobic.

At the same time, Chinese cyber units conducted large-scale data collection operations targeting U.S. government systems, state election infrastructure, and voter databases. In all, China was able to collect personal and political data on over 200 million American voters — information that could be used for influence, targeting, or exploiting the many vulnerabilities of mail-in ballots.

Although we now know that the intelligence community went to extraordinary lengths to try to hide China’s activities from Trump, they did not completely escape the president’s notice. During the 2020 campaign, Trump repeatedly warned that foreign adversaries, particularly China, could easily exploit expanded mail-in voting by manufacturing counterfeit ballots using similar paper stock, printers, and mailing systems. While the mainstream media – no fan of Trump – dismissed these warnings, they mirrored real concerns about election vulnerabilities that intelligence agencies had privately assessed, but refused to tell either the president or the American public.

READ: Trump: China, ‘deep state’ intelligence carried out ‘largest compromise of election data in history’

By 2020, China had both the motive and the means to interfere in the American presidential contest. As the Trump administration continues to peel away the layers of deception sown by the Deep State, which desperately wanted to see Trump defeated, we will learn the extent of China’s involvement. The discovery of unsecured ballot storage, chain-of-custody failures in key jurisdictions, and the later recovery of 2020 election materials in places like Fulton County, Georgia, may finally reveal whether, in key swing states, Beijing was able to help manufacture tens of thousands of votes to push its favored candidate, Joe Biden, over the finish line.

When a foreign adversary acquires massive troves of voter data, hacks into election systems, and seeks to inject fraudulent ballots into the count, it is not engaging in espionage. It is assaulting our very sovereignty.

If evidence emerges — as I believe it will — showing that foreign-manufactured or manipulated ballots were introduced into battleground states in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome, the implications would extend far beyond Donald Trump. Such a finding would mean that a foreign power successfully altered the result of an American presidential election. That is not merely an attack on one candidate, it is an attack on our democracy.

While China’s campaign against Trump was primarily intended to remove a mortal threat to its economic and strategic plans, I believe that it was also about weakening and ultimately destroying American democracy by successfully running — and electing — Manchurian candidates.

Perhaps even more troubling is how some in the intelligence community conspired to keep this information from reaching President Trump. Instead, we were repeatedly assured that the 2020 election was “the most secure in history” by the same officials who knew quite well that China was gathering voter data and exploiting vulnerabilities in election systems. These officials seem to have done little or nothing to stop China’s efforts — indeed, may have welcomed them — because they agreed with China that Trump must be defeated.

While we may be able to bring these traitors — because that’s what they are — to justice, China is certain to continue to interfere in our elections in any way it can.

Strict voter identification requirements, paper ballots with meaningful audits, robust chain-of-custody rules, and limits on unsecured mail-in voting are not partisan measures. They are basic safeguards for self-government in an age of sophisticated and aggressive foreign adversaries like China.

Revealing the truth about the 2020 election is about much more than simply vindicating Donald Trump and those who believe the election was stolen. It is about defending the integrity of the electoral system itself — against all enemies, foreign and domestic — so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people does not perish from the earth.