If you remove yourself from the current spat between USA and China, how can we take for good what "US officials" say, when we all have PROOF, post-Snowden, of what US officials were actually doing?
The previous sentence is a direct quote of a top-3 executive of Huawei I've witnessed personally at a press conference. He was absolutely right.
My point is: if you isolate statements like these, the discourse is going nowhere. Also, for the tapping of Merkel's phone we have proof, for most of the things "US officials" say, we have not, we're just asked constantly to trust what they say and take it at face value, but American institutions have squandered that luxury in the past 20 years.
This is also why telco companies in allied countries that have invested billions in 5G infrastructure from China are not really willing to cancel their plans only based on take-it-or-leave-it and trust-based intelligence.