White House counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka and investigative journalist John Solomon criticized CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss on Saturday, accusing the network of brushing off President Donald Trump’s disclosure that China obtained files on hundreds of millions of American voters.
Solomon, an award-winning journalist, pointed back to the network’s earlier coverage of a Chinese breach of British voter data. He asked why that story got serious treatment while the Trump announcement did not. Solomon put the question to Weiss directly in a post on X.
“Hey @bariweiss, when Biden admin announced China obtained 40 million of Great Britain’s publicly available voter files @CBSNews covered it seriously,” Solomon wrote. “But when DJT announced China got 240 million of Americans voter files your team dismissed like it was no big deal. Why?”
Gorka, deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism, replied to Solomon and broadened the attack, arguing that Weiss carries a lasting bias despite her public break with the New York Times. He said her 2020 resignation had not changed her outlook.
“Despite all the plaudits from those who fell for the spin, Bari Weiss is not a fa[i]r and unbiased ‘journalist,’” Gorka wrote. He added that “she doesn’t want @CBS to report about Chinese subversion of our elections, or the ‘neutral’ government mandarins who subverted the intelligence reporting about those attacks.”
The Trump deputy said Weiss once backed out of a speaking engagement rather than share a stage with him because of his ties to the president. “One normal act by an avowed liberal doth not a Truth-teller or patriot make,” he added.
CBS covered Trump’s Thursday address and quickly framed its central claim as dubious. The network’s election law contributor, David Becker, argued that voter files are public across all 50 states and that there was no evidence China could use the data to alter registrations.
“It sounds bad when you hear about it,” Becker said. “The reality is: voter files in the United States are public.”
China-linked hackers broke into the U.K. Electoral Commission’s registers in 2021. Those records held the names and addresses of roughly 40 million voters. The breach began in 2021 and went undetected for more than a year, the BBC reported. British Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden later blamed Beijing for the attack. The U.K. sanctioned a Chinese state-linked company in response to the hacking, according to Bloomberg.
The criticism of Weiss follows Trump’s prime-time speech, in which he said newly declassified documents showed China’s “illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” beginning in the 2020 election cycle. The declassified records he referred to identified at least 18 states with compromised voter rolls, roughly 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote, and a CIA note alleging Beijing sought to pay American journalists to publish negative stories about Trump.
China’s Foreign Ministry rejected the president’s claims as “false” and a “serious smear,” accusing Washington of vilifying Beijing.
