March 18, 2021- 10: 00 a.m
A Democratic senator lashed out at former Attorney General William Barr for asserting last year that China was the most aggressive nation in the election meddling arena.
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who told MSNBC on Wednesday that Barr would not have made those comments if he was testifying under oath to Congress, was interviewed one day after a U.S. intelligence report was released that determined with “high confidence” that China “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy interference efforts intended to change the outcome” of the November election.
Barr “is just not telling the truth: There’s no one who actually read the intelligence who could come to the conclusion that China was a bigger threat than Russia,” Murphy said.
He was reacting to a clip from an interview Barr did with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer in September. Blitzer asked Barr whether Russia, China, or Iran is “the most assertive, the most aggressive in this area,” to which Barr responded: “I believe it’s China.” When pressed, Barr said that China is even more aggressive than Russia and that he has “seen the intelligence” and “that’s what I’ve concluded.”
Murphy, who called it an “extraordinary clip,” stressed that Barr was “not testifying under oath when he’s talking to Wolf Blitzer. So you’d have to look to see whether he’d make those” comments “when he was under the threat of perjury, as to whether there would be consequences.”
The declassified report released on Tuesday, prepared by the National Intelligence Council, said Russia was scheming to undercut President Biden’s candidacy while Iran sought to undermine former President Donald Trump. The report also stressed that U.S. officials saw no evidence that any foreign actor manipulated any of the election results.
Murphy contended that Barr’s comments were consistent with the Trump administration downplaying the Kremlin’s efforts to get the former president reelected. The Democrat said the Trump team “used China to try to delude people into thinking that there were much more serious threats” but acknowledged that he was not saying that Beijing does not have the capability to interfere in a U.S. election, adding that the country should remain vigilant.
Barry Zulauf, an analytic ombudsman and longtime intelligence official, issued a 14-page report in January that found politicization problems existed in U.S. intelligence agency assessments on foreign influence in the 2020 U.S. election, including analysts who appeared to hold back information on Chinese interference efforts because they disagreed with the Trump administration’s policies.
