While Russia focuses on the presidential race, he said Beijing is convinced that Congress is a locus of anti-China activity.
The Justice Department’s top national-security prosecutor warned that China aims to influence U.S. congressional races, after the federal government last week brought charges against a former aide to New York governors who allegedly acted on Beijing’s behalf.
“We know that the PRC is focused on influencing down-ballot races — congressional races in particular — focusing on candidates that it views as particularly threatening to core PRC security interests,” Matthew Olsen, an assistant attorney general, said this afternoon, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
Olsen, who runs the department’s national-security division, addressed a range of foreign election-interference threats during an event hosted at Columbia Law School by the National Security Law Program.
He warned specifically about efforts directed by Russia, Iran, and China and said these countries view U.S. elections as a “moment of vulnerability for the United States.” Olsen also reiterated the intelligence community’s previous assessment that Russia “poses the most active foreign-influence threat to this year’s elections” and seeks to influence the presidential race. “Those are the three main countries that we’re concerned about, Russia — pretty much in that order — Russia, Iran, and China,” he said.
While Olsen hewed closely to the written remarks that were prepared in advance and later posted online, his comment about Beijing’s specific interest in congressional races was not included in the pre-delivery text of the speech later distributed to media. His remarks on China’s political interference generally followed a September 6 election-security update published by the office of the director of national intelligence, which identified China’s focus on “influencing down-ballot races,” though not the specific focus on Congress.
The September 6 update also said that China is “not attempting to influence the presidential race.” A U.S. intelligence assessment regarding the 2022 midterms, declassified in December 2023, previously found that Chinese leaders ordered officials to focus on Congress “because Beijing is convinced that Congress is a locus of anti-China activity.”
Olsen did not identify specific races in which Beijing-backed actors have demonstrated an interest in influencing this year, but he did refer to a previous Chinese attempt to intervene in a 2022 U.S. congressional race and said that a range of malign Chinese-government actions and “particularly, the transnational repression activities of the PRC, can influence or impact our elections.”
The Justice Department alleged in that case that Qiming Lin, an individual affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) espionage agency, attempted to hire a private investigator to sabotage the congressional-primary campaign of a man later identified in the media as Xiong Yan, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was a student leader at the Tiananmen Square protests. At one point, Lin asked the investigator, who collaborated with federal law enforcement, to manufacture a car accident that would “wreck” the candidate. Yan, who ran in a Democratic primary on Long Island, was not harmed, but he later told National Review that he believes the Chinese government “successfully” tanked his candidacy.
Olsen also noted numerous recent law-enforcement actions and intelligence disclosures involving foreign regimes’ efforts to subvert the American political system. These include the indictments of individuals charged with acting as foreign agents for Russian propaganda outlet RT without registration, the conviction today of four Florida residents on charges that they worked on behalf of Russia’s FSB espionage agency, an intelligence disclosure in July stating that the Iranian government ran an online influence campaign to exploit the anti-Israel protest movement, and the indictment of a former aide to the New York governor on allegations that she acted as an unregistered agent for China.
During a subsequent conversation with Columbia Law professor Matthew Waxman, the national-security-law program’s director, Olsen said the department was pursuing “aggressive” transparency this year by issuing regular updates about foreign countries’ election-interference efforts, as a response to previous foreign-influence controversies surrounding the 2016 and 2020 elections. “What we’re able to do, I think, is to shine a very bright light on this activity, and to do so in a way that’s nonpartisan and nonpolitical but that does arm our citizens with the information that we need to know when we’re dealing with foreign influences, particularly those that are covert,” Olsen said.