Earlier this year, a report from House Democrats claimed that former President Donald Trump received more than $5 million in payments from the Chinese government and Chinese state-owned enterprises while he was in office.
A new report from Reuters indicates that as some of those payments were allegedly rolling in, Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to “to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government.”
Reuters cited three unnamed “former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.”
They said a small team of operatives was assembled to use “bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government,” and leak intelligence to overseas news outlets starting in 2019. Trump took office in 2017 and left in 2021.
According to Reuters, the team spread allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding ill-gotten money overseas. It also claimed that China’s Belt & Road Initiative, which provides funding for infrastructure projects in the developing world, was corrupt. These allegations were based in fact, according to Reuters sources.
Efforts from the CIA team have “not been previously reported,” said Reuters. Per the outlet, the efforts were intended to ramp up paranoia among China’s top leaders after years of effort by China to increase its global influence and create division in the U.S.
“We wanted them chasing ghosts,” one of these former officials explained.
Reuter’s sources said Matt Pottinger, a senior National Security Council official at the time, “crafted the authorization” to create the group. He told Reuters “it would be incorrect to assume that I would have had knowledge of specific U.S. intelligence operations.”
As of this year, Reuters said it wasn’t able to determine the impact of the secret operations. While it also couldn’t determine if the program still existed under the current administration of President Joe Biden, the outlet quoted Kate Waters, a spokesperson for the Biden administration’s National Security Council. She said when the White House grants the CIA covert action authority it often remains in place across administrations.
Paul Heer, a former senior CIA analyst on East Asia who learned of the presidential authorization from Reuters, said that the operation was risky. It had the potential to escalate tensions with the U.S. Heer also said it could backfire against the U.S., sending a message that the country intervenes in the affairs of other nations while “rejecting the principles of peaceful coexistence.”
“There are places in the world where that is going to be a resonant message,” he said.
A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said revelations about the program indicate the U.S. government uses the “public opinion space and media platforms as weapons to spread false information and manipulate international public opinion.”
According to Reuters, CIA spokesperson Chelsea Robinson declined to comment on the program.
During his term in the White House, Trump entered a trade war with China when he put large tariffs in place. He’s now likely to be the GOP presidential candidate in November, and he has already started talking about new plans for tariffs on Chinese goods, CNBC reported.
However, he also encouraged lawmakers not to support a bill “that would force Beijing-based ByteDance to divest TikTok within six months or face a ban on the app in the U.S.,” according to POLTICO. House Republicans and voted in favor of the bill in a rare break from Trump and it passed in the chamber.
During a press conference Thursday, a Chinese official said the bill “puts the US on the opposite side of the principles of fair competition and international trade rules.”