House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended her claim that the threats posed by Russia, China and Iran to interfere in the presidential are not equal, following an intelligence report last week that found Russia is targeting former Vice President Joe Biden, while China and Iran are hoping President Donald Trump will lose.
“They’re not equivalent,” Pelosi said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.“ She added that the intelligence community needs to “put more information out there.”
“Russia is actively 24/7 interfering in our election. They did so in 2016, and they are doing so now,” Pelosi added.
Pelosi said in an earlier interview on “Fox News Sunday“ she’s long been a critic of China — in 1991, she held up a protest banner in China’s Tiananmen Square — but to “give some equivalence” of China and Russia on measures to interfere with the election “doesn’t really tell the story. As long as they tell the whole story about Russia, then they can hide it any way they want, but the American people need to know.”
“The Chinese, they said, prefer Biden — we don't know that, but that's what they're saying, but they're not really getting involved in the presidential election,” Pelosi said.
The Trump administration and congressional Democrats have sparred over whether the three countries in the report — Russia, China and Iran — should be placed in the same playing field. Democrats argue that the warning on election interference should not equate Russia’s interference efforts with those by China and Iran.
“We assess that Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment,’” Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said in a statement Friday.
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