Schiff, who is the chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said on MSNBC Friday that he had been “urging Bill Evanina and other members of the intelligence community to catch up with the American people about what is happening.” . He said the warning gave “a false sense of equivalence between what Russia is doing, what China is doing, what Iran is doing.”
Mr. Schiff and the three other authors of the letter have been extensively informed about intelligence and are therefore prohibited from violating the classification rules by describing what they have seen.
But Schiff, a frequent target of harsh criticism from Trump because he was the manager of the Democrats at the impeachment in the Senate, added: “I think our adversaries, particularly the Russians, are going to amplify the false.” messages the president is posting, ‘Well, you can’t trust absentee ballots,’ even though this is how the president votes. ”
Some intelligence officials expressed surprise at the legislators’ letter and insisted that they were not trying to minimize Moscow’s threat of interference or to point out that China was a major challenge. They said Mr. Evanina’s statement should be the start of a series of public statements, according to an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The official said the statement did not minimize the threat of Russian interference, but lawmakers had to understand that the 2020 contest would be different from the 2016 one.
It is unclear whether those statements, however, discourage further actions by American adversaries. But it is clear that 2020 will not be the same as 2016: the Russians know that they cannot use the same playbook, and Iran and China seem ready to play a bigger role.
The question is whether they will be on the same side or work against each other.
After the 2016 election, American intelligence evaluations concluded that the Russians finally intervened on behalf of Trump. But this year, Republicans and Democrats who have reviewed intelligence have come up with different evaluations on whether Russia hopes to pass the election to Trump or whether President Vladimir V. Putin is simply trying to erode confidence in the American electoral system.
