The obvious Trump admin game plan is to distort and inflate nature of the election interference threat from China (which IC never claimed has occurred but they can spin as favoring Biden) while downplaying Russian's well-documented and ongoing active interference to help Trump. https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1301294564498649091

Here is the actual ODNI assessment regarding China and Russia. https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2139-statement-by-ncsc-director-william-evanina-election-threat-update-for-the-american-public

The intelligence is describing two entirely different things with respect to election integrity. It says China is broadly attempting to shape the policy environment to be favorable to its interest (in other words the normal CI threat) and describes no election specific activity.

On the other hand, the IC assess that Russia is taking affirmative measures to interfere in the election in order to harm Biden and help Trump. It says nothing about the other range of Russia CI threats unrelated to our election, which are also ongoing.

When we are talking about the counterintelligence context outside of elections, most experts will agree that China is more aggressive and a bigger threat to our national interest. There are real concerns that excess focus on Russia generally is leading us to neglect this threat.

But Barr isn't being asked about a general CI context by @wolfblitzer, as with Evanina's statement, the context is election interference specifically. That's why Barr's answer is fundamentally deceptive.

The China CI threat is a serious problem, but the idea that China simply prefers Trump not win reelection because he is unpredictable isn't part of that. All governments in the world have internal views of how various candidates would likely impact their countries interests.

And many countries engage in espionage targeted at campaigns and candidates in order to learn about how those individuals might impact their national interest. It's one reason the IC missed what was happening in 2016. It assumed Russia was up to "normal" espionage.

It wasn't until the Russians started leaking material it stole from the DNC that it become clear this was uncharted territory (and the scope of the social media influence operations was still unclear). No one likes being the target of routine espionage, but this crossed a line.

What Barr and co are doing is taking 1) the existence of aggressive China's counter intelligence threats and 2) the apparent Chinese opposition to Trump and then attempting to create the misleading impression that China is interfering in the US election on behalf of Biden.