Rep. Adam Schiff on Threats To the Election

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): Well, normal circumstance the system is more than capable of handling this. We’ve handled millions and millions of absentee ballots without a problem in the past, but we’ve never had a president who was the problem. A president who is seeking to discredit the election in advance, to cast doubt on it, to raise suspicions about it, who is encouraging of foreign powers like Russia to do the same and amplify his false messages. And if we have the election and the president does what he is capable of doing, and that is declaring a false victory before the votes have been counted and then unleashing legal dogs to try to attack the balloting process and egging on the people around the country to acts of violence, which he is also more than capable of doing, then we’re in very uncharted waters. I think the remedy here is Americans doing their civil and civic duty and turning out in such massive numbers that the election isn’t even close, that any effort by the president to dispute the results of falls on deaf ears. But if it is close and the president can contest it, I think it could be far worse than what we saw in 2000.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: You heard what I introduced the program with, with the horrified reactions from allied states around the world. Now, the main advisory or competitor China, which we’re going to talk about in more detail in a moment, also had some things to say, obviously, not President Xi and not the actual party leadership, but the “Times,” the “Global Times,” which is closely aligned with the leadership said the candidates and the debate obviously did not show an exemplary role to the American people on how to engage in debate. So, that’s their comment. I want to know what you think in terms of foreign interference. You know, most people believe that Russia is the main foreign instigator into, you know, confusing the American democratic process. But others, some of them, like President Trump, talks about China doing that. What do you know in terms of intelligence? Who’s the biggest culprit in interfering in America’s elections?

SCHIFF: There’s no question when you look at the intelligence that it is Russia that is most actively intervening to try to determine the result to try to help reelect Donald Trump and to sow chaos in the United States, and it’s doing that in a number of ways, on social media, through hacking operations, but it is amplifying the president’s false claims about mail-in voting and amplifying the president’s false smears against Joe Biden. China, the Intelligence Community has acknowledged publicly, has a preference for who wins. Now, that’s not uncommon. Probably most nations on earth have a preference about who they’d like to see as president of the United States. It’s a very different thing though when you’re engaged across a whole series of modalities to try to influence the outcome and do so covertly, that’s what the Russians are doing and that puts them in a completely different category.