Time to Target Tech Giants Fueling Disorder | The U.S. and China Are Clearing Up Their Deportation Fights | Deterring Foreign Election Interference, and more

Moscow is targeting U.S. swing states in particular, the official said, and using artificial intelligence to more quickly and convincingly create fake content to shape the outcome in favor of former president Donald Trump.
That is “consistent with Moscow’s broader foreign policy goals of weakening the United States and undermining Washington’s support for Ukraine,” the ODNI official said, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the agency.
This week, the U.S. government announced a sweeping set of actions to counter Russian influence campaigns, including an indictment of two Russian employees of the state-run news site RT for allegedly paying an American media company to spread English-language videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X.
Prosecutors also seized 32 Russian-controlled internet domains that were used in a state-led influence effort called “Doppelganger” to undermine international support for Ukraine. In addition, the Treasury and State departments announced sanctions on Russian individuals and entities that are accused of disseminating propaganda.

Trump Dismisses New Warnings of Russian Interference in Election  (Abbie Cheeseman and Marianne LeVine, Washinton Post)
A day after spending much of a 49-minute news conference revisiting — and denying — sexual misconduct allegations leveled against him, Donald Trump used part of a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Saturday to discuss another subject that has bedeviled his campaigns for president: Russian interference in U.S. elections.
U.S. intelligence officials warned Friday that the Russian government’s covert efforts to sway the presidential election are “more sophisticated than in prior election cycles,” and that Moscow is using artificial intelligence to create increasingly convincing fake content that could aid Trump. Four years ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously endorsed the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in an effort to boost Trump.
But Trump, who has repeatedly described the probes into Russian interference in the 2016 election as a “hoax,” is dismissing them this time around, too.
“The Justice Department said Russia may be involved in our elections again,” Trump told the crowd at his rally. “And, you know, the whole world laughed at them this time.”
The Republican presidential nominee’s comments appeared to reference the indictment Wednesday of two Russia-based employees of Russia’s state-run news site, RT, in an alleged scheme in which they paid an American media company to spread English-language videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X.
“It’s Russia, Russia, Russia all over again. But they don’t look at China and they don’t look at Iran. They look at Russia. I don’t know what it is with poor Russia,” Trump said.

Trump Pledges to Jail Opponents, Baselessly Suggests Election Will Be Stolen from Him  (Amy Gardner, Colby Itkowitz and Mariana Alfaro, Washington Post)
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump threatened to jail people “involved in unscrupulous behavior” related to voting in the 2024 election, suggesting without evidence that the election could be stolen from him — and prompting widespread condemnation from election officials who said such rhetoric could provoke violence.
Trump’s remarks, made in a social media posting on Saturday night, represent the most overt signal yet that he may not accept the result in November if he loses.
Trump has a history of railing against election officials and raising unsubstantiated claims of fraud when his political fortunes appear uncertain, as they do now in his extremely close race with Vice President Kamala Harris. His comments are his most direct threats made against those who will administer elections this year.
In reality, illegal voting is exceedingly rare. But Trump appears to be replaying his efforts to sow doubt about the voting process ahead of the 2020 election — actions that contributed to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Trump wrote on Saturday on his Truth Social platform. “We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T!”
Trump, who began his message with the words “CEASE & DESIST,” went on to threaten a wide range of the kinds of people who would face prosecution and prison time, including campaign donors and those involved in administering elections.
“Please be aware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters & Corrupt Election Officials,” he wrote, adding that such people will be “sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

The U.S. and China Are Clearing Up Their Deportation Fights  (Han Chen, Foreign Policy)
For years, the United States has accused China of foot-dragging in accepting Chinese deportees found to be in the United States illegally. But that long-standing dispute may finally be resolved after Beijing allowed the United States to fly home hundreds of Chinese nationals this June. There are signs that more deportation flights could be in the works.
At a time when Washington and Beijing are locked in fierce strategic competition, the resumption of cooperation on deportation is a case study on how these two powers can find ways to address pain points in bilateral relations.
The U.S. presidential race might become another turning point and trigger a wave of deportations of Chinese migrants, if the former President Donald Trump—the Republican Party’s nominee—gets his way. At the very least, a Trump win would inject new uncertainty into the process following his pledge to start “the largest deportation operation in American history.”
The deportation flights came amid a historic wave of Chinese migrants crossing into the United States at the southern border. Driven by an economic downturn at home and the traumatic fallout of COVID-19 lockdowns as well as mounting political repression, tens of thousands of Chinese nationals have joined the zouxian (“walk the route”) movement to leave the country, according to interviews with the migrants.
For decades, China’s wealthy and well-educated have immigrated to the United States legally through investment or employment visas, or simply by sending their children to study there in hopes of getting sponsored for citizenship one day.
But for less well-off migrants, the latest route largely entails flying into select South America countries that offer visa-free entry to Chinese, traversing the treacherous jungle through the Darién Gap between the Colombia-Panama border, and crossing a host of Central American countries before finally presenting themselves to U.S. Border Patrol agents in Texas or California.
More than 24,000 Chinese migrants illegally crossed the U.S. southern border during the 2023 fiscal year, according to government data, compared to fewer than 15,000 Chinese migrants in the previous 10 years combined.

Deterring Foreign Election Interference  (Zac Morgan, National Interest)
For some time now, the West has leapfrogged from deterrence failure to deterrence failure. Not merely against mass military action, such as Russia’s seizure of Crimea or its subsequent war for the rest of Ukraine, but against political warfare conducted by members of the loose anti-Western coalition of states (China, Russia, and Iran) waging unfriendly competition against the liberal democracies.
Russia famously, albeit sloppily, interfered in the 2016 election, and, nevertheless, eight years later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence still rates Moscow as “the predominant threat to U.S. elections.” Iran sent emails impersonating the Proud Boys in the 2020 election, but four years later, it is still running “covert online influence operations” aimed at securing a preferred result this November. Even when these state-sponsored efforts are clumsy or broadly unsuccessful, they still may carry within them the seeds of popular challenges to the legitimacy of a subsequently elected administration. And yet they persist—and the risk of future, sharper attacks remain on the table.
Witness, for instance, the ongoing crisis up in Canada, where Beijing has evidently conducted a wide-ranging assault on the polity of our vital trading partner and fellow NATO member. An ongoing public inquiry into foreign interference has already revealed that “China has been assessed by Canadian authorities as the most active foreign state actor engaged in interference directed at government officials, political organizations, candidates for political office[,] and diaspora communities.” That body’s interim findings have been supplemented by the recently released conclusions from Canada’s National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians’ “Special Report on Foreign Interference in Canada’s Democratic Processes and Institutions.”
Relying on the Committee’s “access to highly classified information,” the Special Report paints a dark portrait of the Canadian work of the United Front Work Department, a branch of the Chinese Communist Party. According to the report, the Department:
[O]perates through a large network that includes front organizations which do not declare their affiliation to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and have an additional overt and legal function. These front organizations tasked state-owned enterprises, Chinese-registered private companies, Chinese student organizations, foreign cultural organizations, foreign media, members of Chinese ethnocultural communities, and prominent businesspersons and political figures to engage in democratic institutions and processes in a way that supports the goals of the CCP.