POLITICS: Democrats blame Russia to dismiss China’s dragon in the room

“Russia, Russia, Russia” — it’s back, says the Harris-Biden administration, and just in time for the fall election season.

Once again, Democrats want to talk about Russian election interference.

Attorney General Merrick Garland aims to convince voters that Russian meddling is the main thing they should worry about as Nov. 5 approaches.

Garland rolled out new charges Wednesday against two Russia Today media figures, and announced the seizures of some allegedly connected Internet domains to add some drama.

Personally involving the attorney general in publicizing the charges is an obvious effort to get them more news attention — and a signal to party spokespeople that they should be playing this up against Donald Trump.

For years now, Russian interference has been the Democrats’ all-purpose excuse for suppressing bad news.

Remember when they lined up a bunch of former intelligence officers to swear that this newspaper’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation?

The Russians aren’t alone, however — and the Democrats seem a little overly eager to distract from what the Chinese and the Iranians have been up to.

Chinese influence has penetrated deep into American politics in the years since Hunter and Jim Biden went into business with a state-run Chinese company, and Hunter agreed to represent the man he called the “f***ing spy chief of China.”

A Chinese spy served as a driver for the late California Sen. Dianne Feinstein for 20 years. A female Chinese agent penetrated the circle of California Rep. Eric Swalwell.

Just this week, after a six-months-long investigation, The Washington Post reported extensive Chinese influence in San Francisco, including the use of Chinese agents and diplomats to provoke violent protests and silence critics of the Chinese regime in the city.

And it’s not just California: Xi Jinping’s agents are burrowing into American politics across the nation, and a lot of them seem to end up cozying up to Democrats.

This week’s federal charges against Linda Sun, an aide to New York Gov. Hochul and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, show Sun acting as an agent for China, even letting one of her Chinese handlers listen in on a private call among American COVID policymakers and helping control what both governors said about China and Taiwan.

In return for aiding the Chinese Communist Party, she and her husband were paid millions in kickbacks, the indictments claim.

Sun apparently got her job in Albany through her connections with Rep. Grace Meng, having served as Meng’s chief of staff when the Queens congresswoman was in the State Assembly.

Meng, like Hochul, got a speaking slot at last month’s Democratic National Convention.

That may only scratch the surface of China’s influence in New York.

One Queens Democrat told The Post, “The CCP is trying to infiltrate” the borough, and that “at parades there are signs for the CCP” reflecting that influence.

In 2022, when Brooklynite Xiong Yan, a dissident from China who participated in the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, ran in a Democratic congressional primary, he was targeted by the Chinese government, which smeared him with a whisper campaign — and planned to resort to violence if that didn’t work. Yan lost.

Then there are the Iranians.

Last month, the Trump campaign complained that it had been the target of foreign hackers. Democrats scoffed — but an investigation by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded that Iran was in fact guilty.

The agencies issued a joint statement warning: “We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting Presidential campaigns.”

I doubt they were hacking the Trump campaign in order to help it win.

Iranian hackers similarly targeted a former Trump official and Iran critic in 2022, CNN reported, as well as a former Biden diplomat.

The Iranians have been at their influence effort for a while: Biden’s Iran envoy, Robert Malley, had his security clearance suspended and has been investigated by the FBI.

House Republican investigators wrote that Malley “allegedly transferred classified documents to his personal email account and downloaded these documents to his personal cellphone,” where they were accessed by “a hostile cyber actor.” The documents reportedly included Malley’s detailed notes of his interactions with Iranian officials.

Malley had previously hired two Teheran-backed members of the “Iran Experts Initiative,” a project to place academics and researchers friendly to the Iranian regime in positions to influence American policy.

All this comes after New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez had to resign following his conviction for acting as an agent for the Egyptian government in exchange for gold and luxury cars, and while Mayor Adams is under investigation for illegal campaign contributions from Turkey.

Let’s not forget the Biden family influence business extended to Ukraine and Romania as well.

But of all these scandals, the Chinese influence operation ought to worry us the most.

China is bigger, richer and more sophisticated than Russia, Iran or the others. It’s our chief geopolitical rival — and the senior partner in its alliances with Russia and Iran.

Maybe it’s time we started saying “China, China, China.”

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review. Twitter: @BaseballCrank