Russia and Iran Tried to Influence 2020 Presidential Election, But China Did Not, Intelligence Report Says
Putin authorized extensive election influence campaign, intelligence report says.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized election interference operations that aimed to benefit former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign.Credit…Pool photo by Alexei Druzhinin
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to interfere in the American presidential election to denigrate the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr., including intelligence operations to influence people close to former President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released Tuesday.
The report did not name those people but seemed to be a reference to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed allegations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.
“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions in a consistent manner,” the report said.
The declassified report represented the most comprehensive intelligence assessment of foreign efforts to influence the 2020 vote. Besides Russia, Iran and other countries sought to influence the election, the report said. China considered efforts to influence the presidential vote, but ultimately concluded that any such operation would fail and most likely backfire, intelligence officials concluded.
A companion report by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security also rejected false allegations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the election that Venezuela or other foreign countries defrauded the election.
The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined the allegations that Mr. Trump and his allies spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.
The report also found that there were no efforts by Russia or other countries to change ballots themselves, unlike in 2016. Efforts by Russian hackers to probe state and local networks were unrelated to efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential vote.
Some of the information in the intelligence report was released in the months leading up to the election, reflecting an effort by the intelligence community to release more information about foreign operations during the campaign season after its reluctance to do so in 2016 helped misinformation spread.
Mayorkas expects border agents to confront more migrants at the U.S. border with Mexico than in the last 20 years.
Asylum-seekers from Central America awaited transportation in Penitas, Texas, on Friday after crossing the Rio Grande into the United States on a raft from Mexico.Credit…Adrees Latif/Reuters
Border officials are expecting to encounter more migrants at the southwest border and its port entries this year than in the last two decades, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, said Tuesday.
“Poverty, high levels of violence and corruption in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries have propelled migration to our southwest border for years,” Mr. Mayorkas said, referring to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. He also cited two hurricanes that damaged the region last year. “The adverse conditions have continued to deteriorate.”
President Biden has faced intensifying criticism over his handling of migration to the U.S. border with Mexico, particularly the treatment of thousands of Central American children and teenagers stuck in border detention facilities. Lawyers who interviewed some of the young migrants in Texas have reported that they had been left to sleep on gym mats with foil sheets and had been confined to an overcrowded tent.
More than 9,400 minors — ranging from young children to teenagers — arrived along the border without parents in February, a nearly threefold increase over that month last year.
The encounters specified by Mr. Mayorkas include migrants who will be detained in U.S. border facilities as well as those rapidly turned away under a pandemic emergency rule. It does not include those who manage to avoid border agents when crossing the border. Many of those who crossed the border in the early 2000s were single adults seeking economic opportunity.
The administration has scrambled to find shelter space to move the children out of the detention facilities designed for adults. It will soon open a temporary center at a former camp for oil field workers in Midland, Texas, and move teenage boys to a convention center in Dallas. Mr. Mayorkas said the administration was working to set up an additional shelter in Arizona.
The backlog in shelters managed by Health and Human Services, which until recently were strained by coronavirus occupancy limits, has caused a logjam in Border Patrol processing facilities and resulted in the detention of many children for several days longer than the maximum 72 hours allowed under federal law. Roughly 4,000 children and teenagers were in border facilities as of Sunday.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has made the situation more complicated,” Mr. Mayorkas said in the written statement. “There are restrictions and protocols that need to be followed.”
Mr. Mayorkas said in the statement that the administration was working to open “joint processing centers” so the children could be moved to the custody of Health and Human Services shortly after they were stopped by border agents. The Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to questions seeking additional details.
Mr. Mayorkas’s statement also came a day after Republican members of Congress traveled to the border to accuse Mr. Biden of opening the doors to illegal migration.
But a majority of the border crossings involved single adults, who under a public health emergency rule are often quickly expelled back to Mexico or their home countries, Mr. Mayorkas said.The administration has also used the rule against families, except in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Mexican officials in neighboring Tamaulipas, Mexico, have refused to accept the families the United States has tried to rapidly turn away after the passing of a Mexican law that prohibited detaining young immigrant children. As a result, border agents have dropped the families off at bus stations in South Texas communities.
The Biden administration has broken from the Trump administration in declining to restore a process of rapidly turning away unaccompanied minors. More than 29,700 have been detained this fiscal year — about 400 a day so far in March — compared with 17,100 during the same period last fiscal year.
The administration has announced multiple long-term strategies to deter migration, including investing foreign aid in Central America and restarting a program allowing some migrant children to apply for refugee status in the United States from their home countries and avoid making the dangerous journey north to join parents already in the United States.
But Mr. Biden faces an immediate humanitarian crisis at the border. He has placed Health and Human Services officials inside border detention centers to try to quickly identify sponsors for the children. Mr. Biden also deployed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help identify shelter space to move the children and teenagers out of the border jails.
When asked at the White House on Tuesday if he plans to visit the southern border, Mr. Biden replied, “not at the moment.”
