#Wray says Russia, China tried to ‘piggyback’ on Floyd unrest

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday testified to Congress that Russia and China sought to exploit anti-police brutality and anti-racism unrest following the May killing of George Floyd.

Wray said that ahead of the presidential election both China and Russia tried to “piggyback” on protests and violence sparked by the Minneapolis police killing of Floyd.

“We have seen some efforts by our foreign adversaries — I would mention China and Russia specifically, but not exclusively — to sort of piggyback on a lot of the unrest activity that’s been occurring as part of the effort either to sow divisiveness and discord in the case of the Russians, or to try to advance their own narratives, say, in the case of the Chinese,” Wray told a House committee.

The FBI leader said that in many cases social media companies have been reporting on suspected foreign efforts. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were scorched by lawmakers for not doing more to halt Russian activities in 2016.

“We do have relationships with the social media companies … They will sometimes detect activity on their platforms, and working jointly with us, they will sometimes use their Terms of Use or Terms of Service to shut down or kick off those accounts and flag information for law enforcement,” he said.

Wray said Russia is again seeking to influence the presidential election while China has become “by far the biggest chunk of our counterintelligence portfolio.”

Wray testified to the House Homeland Security Committee after Democrats and Trump administration officials clashed this month on whether China, which is believed to favor Democratic candidate Joe Biden, or Russia are the top threat.

The FBI director said, “we certainly have seen very active, very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020 through what I would call more the ‘malign foreign influence’ side of things — social media, use of proxies, state media, online journals, etc.”

The Russian role is “an effort to both so divisiveness and discord, and — I think the intelligence community has assessed this publicly — primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden and what the Russians see as kind of an anti-Russian establishment.”

China, meanwhile, has emerged as the top overall focus of FBI investigations on foreign influence in the US, Wray said.

The FBI now has “over 2000 counterintelligence investigations related to China” and “we are opening a new Chinese counterintelligence investigation about every 10 hours. And so the scope and scale of this threat is really breathtaking,” Wray said.

Wray said unlike in 2016, the FBI has not seen from Russia an effort to target online election infrastructure.

The FBI director praised US institutions for cooperating against China.

“I will tell you I’m very encouraged by the response we’ve gotten from both the private sector and frankly the academic sector lately. I think people in this country are starting to wake up to the threat and voluntarily undertaking appropriate measures,” he said.