US President Donald Trump said Washington will discuss alleged 2020 election interference with Beijing but played down prospects of retaliation. The comments came ahead of planned talks between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Trump told reporters on Tuesday that the alleged interference “took place a long time ago” and that China might be “a little bit different today than it was then.”
“They do things to us and we do things to them,” Trump said. “I’ll be honest, we do things to them too. It’s not a one-way street, but we’ll be talking to them.”
People familiar with the planning said the meeting between Rubio and Wang Yi is expected to take place on Wednesday in Manila on the sidelines of Association of Southeast Asian Nations meetings. The talks come less than a week after Trump accused China of carrying out the “largest compromise of election data in history” and obtaining over 200 million US voter records.
