Donald Trump boasted to Xi Jinping that the U.S. is better at spying than China.
The president revealed that he told Xi Jinping that American spooks have targeted China in ways that Beijing has no clue are happening.
Asked on board Air Force One if he asked Xi about China’s cyberattacks targeting the U.S., Trump said: “I did. And he talked about attacks we did in China. You know, what they do, we do too. We spy like hell on them, too.”
“I told him, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about,’” Trump, 79, continued.
When pressed further, Trump explained: “I’m talking about spying. The question was asked of me yesterday, I guess, ‘What about the fact that China is spying?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s one of those things because we spy like hell on them, too.’”
Trump was also asked if he was concerned about the Chinese secretly inserting code in the U.S. infrastructure.
“You don’t know that,” he said. ”I’d like to see it, but it’s very possible that they do. And we’re doing things to them. I told them, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about, and you are doing stuff to us that we probably do know about.
“But we do plenty. It’s a double-edged sword,” he declared.
While Trump appeared unconcerned about China’s spying capabilities and intentions, his staff took precautions to ensure that passengers aboard Air Force One were not bugged.
U.S. officials took all badges and pins issued by China from journalists traveling on the plane and put them, along with staff burner phones, in a bin at the bottom of the steps on the tarmac, according to New York Post White House correspondent Emily Goodin.
“Nothing from China allowed on the plane,” Goodin wrote on X.
“I have sources that were on the plane too, and they had to leave their American phones, turn them off, they did not take them into China—or if they did, they left them on the planes, they turned them off. They didn’t use them,” Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox & Friends.
“All the Americans were using burner phones and they had to destroy them and leave them in China,” she added. “They don’t want anything that belongs to the Chinese left on that plane because they could be bugged, there could be spies.”
U.S. intelligence agencies have branded China as one of the most serious cyber threats. State-sponsored spies have been identified as targeting critical infrastructure, telecommunications, and government agencies around the world.
