The FBI believes there is an “elevated” risk of outside election interference or influence in the 2024 presidential election, according to its director, Christopher Wray.
“I think it’s fair to say that they are elevated from where they were before,” Mr. Wray told a Senate committee last week. “And to elaborate just slightly on that point, obviously we saw, and it’s not disputed, that the Russians tried to interfere in the 2016 election and then continued. But what we’ve seen since then is other adversaries attempting to take a page out of the Russians’ playbook.”
He added that the FBI and other national security officials are “keenly focused” on the threat of potential election interference in 2024 elections. That includes focusing on “the risk that foreign adversaries, whether it’s Russia, whether it’s China, whether it’s Iran or others, would seek to interfere in our elections,” he continued.
“It is not seriously disputed that our foreign adversaries have tried and are continuing to try to interfere in our elections,” Mr. Wray, who has been the head of the FBI since 2017, told the lawmakers.
For years, former President Donald Trump has said that he believes the 2020 election was stolen and rife with fraud—namely around mail-in ballots. He has also warned that recent criminal cases against him are tantamount to a form of election interference ahead of the 2024 election.
Meanwhile, Democrats and some corporate news outlets, citing anonymous and spurious sources, have claimed that Russia worked with President Trump to help him win the 2016 election, although those claims were mostly debunked in subsequent investigations. President Trump has long said that the Russia collusion claims were a hoax and merely an attempt to harm his political chances.
Mr. Wray made no mention of either of those claims during his recent congressional testimony.
Microsoft Warning
Several weeks ago, major software company Microsoft warned that China, Russia, and Iran are likely to engage in influence and interference efforts ahead of the 2024 presidential election, according to its analysts.“For Russia, Iran, and China, the next U.S. president will define the direction of conflict—whether wars might occur, or peace might prevail,” said the new report from the company, released in November. The three countries are “unlikely to sit out next year’s contest ... the stakes are simply too high.”
“America’s social media ecosystem today is far more visual than in previous years,” the analysis said. “Memes, gifs, podcasts, video clips, and influencers are the means of today’s influence operations—not bots and pithy text posts.”
It added that over the past three years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “has dramatically scaled up the scope and sophistication of its overt and covert influence activity around the world and expanded its covert social media operations, undertaking light influence activity during the 2022 US midterm elections,” Microsoft said.
Neither the firm nor Mr. Wray made any mention of TikTok, a social media platform often used by younger Americans that is owned by ByteDance, a China-based company with reported ties to the CCP.
Some Republicans have said that TikTok should be banned in the United States or, at the very least, sold to another company in order for it to operate. A number of countries have banned the social media app, including India and Nepal.
The report also came as a federal U.S. attorney of the central district of California, Martin Estrada, issued a warning about the Chinese regime’s attempts to influence U.S. elections.
“We’re the gateway to Asia,” Mr. Estrada told House Judiciary Committee members, referring to California. “And we have the People’s Republic of China trying to influence our elections, trying to target some of our individuals.”
In September, the Canadian government announced an investigation into whether China, Russia, or other nations interfered in the 2019 and 2021 Canadian general elections.
Opposition Conservative lawmakers have demanded a full public inquiry into alleged Chinese interference since reports surfaced earlier this year citing intelligence sources saying China worked to support the Liberals and to defeat Conservative politicians considered unfriendly to Beijing.
Earlier this year, Canada expelled a Chinese diplomat whom Canada’s spy agency alleged was involved in a plot to intimidate an opposition Conservative lawmaker and his relatives in Hong Kong after the Conservative lawmaker criticized Beijing’s human rights violations. China then announced the expulsion of a Canadian diplomat in retaliation.
