The Biden administration is manipulating intelligence to make Russia look like a bigger concern to America than China, former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell told Newsmax TV.
President Joe Biden on Thursday announced sanctions on Russia for the SolarWinds hack that allowed spying on the Department of Homeland Security and Treasury Department and for its continued presence in Crimea.
"Russia is a problem, there's no question about it, but there is no crisis, other than the typical Russia attitude towards Ukraine, of course, that that's always of an urgent matter," Grenell said Thursday on "The Chris Salcedo Show."
"What Joe Biden did today was manipulate intelligence, and [Director of National Intelligence] Avril Haines allowed him to do it," Grenell said.
Russia seized Crimea when Biden was vice president under President Barack Obama, so that problem has been going on for a very long time, he noted.
China is an actual crisis, and the intelligence shows it, said Grenell, who headed up America's intel gathering during the Trump administration.
"What they've been able to do with spies and with manipulation of intelligence and to convince many Democrats to talk about Russia as the crisis, it's a look-over-there strategy," he said. "The Beijing line is for Democrats to say, 'Look at Russia.'"
If Russia were actually an emergency, Grenell said, Biden wouldn't have allowed Germany to continue it's deal to build the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea to get natural gas from Russia and bypass Ukraine, thereby allowing Germany to feed the so-called Russian emergency.
"It's worth saying: Russia is a problem, China is a crisis," Grenell said, adding he did not want to divulge what intelligence the United States has on China.
The Trump administration tried to penalize China and bring them back to the table, he said.
"The engagement idea is always a good idea," he said. "I think President Trump tried to engage with North Korea. We've tried to engage with Iran, but you know what's worse than the engagement strategy is an administration who engages and never benchmarks, whether or not engagement works."
Continuing to engage when you know that it's failing means that the goal itself is engagement, not to change behavior, Grenell said.
"We were very clear with the Chinese that the idea that bringing China into the [World Trade Organization], for instance," he said. "The idea 20 years ago that we would engage with them and they would come to a greater sense of the rule of law or respect for human rights. It's gotten worse in China since we allowed them into the WTO. We need to benchmark engagement more in the United States, and we need to make sure that when it does it for sure, we stop it."
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