Russia won’t be the only country meddling in the upcoming midterm elections, national security adviser John Bolton said on Sunday, China, Iran and North Korea will also be trying to disrupt the vote.
“I can say definitively that it’s a sufficient national security concern about Chinese meddling, Iranian meddling and North Korean meddling that we’re taking steps to prevent it,” Bolton said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I’m not going to get into what I’ve seen or haven’t seen, but I’m telling you, looking at the 2018 election, those are the countries we’re most concerned about.”
Asked for evidence he had seen pointing to China interfering, Bolton deviated.
“I’m not going to get into the – what I’ve seen or haven’t seen, but I’m telling you, looking at the 2018 election, those are the four countries that we’re most concerned about,” he said.
Bolton’s comments come a day after President Trump tweeted on Saturday that “all of the fools that are so focused on looking at Russia should start also looking in another direction, China.”
He also said he would bring up Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 election when he meets with his Russian counterpart Nikolai Patrushev this week in Geneva.
“I had a discussion about it myself with President Putin when I went to Moscow originally to prepare the groundwork for his meeting with President Trump. President Trump raised it with President Putin,” he said.
Trump came under fierce criticism for saying he accepted Putin’s denying his government interfered over the consensus of the US intelligence community that it did.
“So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Trump said at the Helsinki summit in July.
Bolton said the US is working to thwart the efforts to meddle in November’s election, but said he can’t go into details.
“And there are a lot of things we’re doing that we can’t talk about specifically. And that includes both defensive and offensive cyber operations to protect the integrity of the election process,” he said.
