Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has uncovered evidence that intelligence agencies systematically misled both Congress and President Trump about the scope of China’s interference in American elections — and if you’re shocked by this, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to the last decade of intelligence community shenanigans.
These are the same “faithful career public servants” who told us Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. These people couldn’t tell the truth if you waterboarded them with a polygraph machine.
According to Just the News, Gabbard’s investigation found that intelligence officers were asked to alter evidence of Chinese election meddling, that critical intelligence was suppressed from the President’s Daily Brief, and that congressional briefings on foreign interference were deliberately manipulated to downplay Beijing’s role. China reportedly hacked or accessed voter registration databases in an estimated 12 to 18 states during the 2020 election cycle. But somehow, the intelligence community wanted you to believe the only foreign boogeyman was Vladimir Putin.
The rot goes deep. Back in February 2020, the White House received a briefing on election vulnerabilities. A January 15, 2020 National Intelligence Council memo addressed the issue. An October 2020 NIC alternative analysis memo specifically examined Chinese election influence. And yet, despite all of this, the intelligence community’s official line remained that China wasn’t really trying to meddle.
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Former DNI John Ratcliffe — now CIA Director — tried to blow the whistle on this back in January 2021. He wrote that intelligence agencies had created a “false impression that Russia sought to influence the election, but China did not.” Ratcliffe stated plainly: “From my unique vantage point as the individual who consumes all of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence on the People’s Republic of China, I do not believe the majority view expressed by the Intelligence Community analysts fully and accurately reflects the scope of the Chinese government’s efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections.”
That’s the guy with the highest security clearance in the land saying his own analysts were lying. Let that sink in.
Barry Zulauf, the intelligence community’s Analytic Ombudsman, confirmed the problem in a report made public on January 7, 2021, to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Zulauf found that “given analytic differences in the way Russia and China analysts examined their targets, China analysts appeared hesitant to assess Chinese actions as undue influence or interference.” Translation: the China desk didn’t want to make waves.
But it gets worse. Zulauf reported that analysts openly admitted they didn’t want their intelligence used by “that vulgarian in the Oval Office” for China policies they disagreed with. That’s right — unelected intelligence bureaucrats decided their personal contempt for the sitting president was more important than national security. They buried evidence of a hostile foreign power targeting our elections because they didn’t like Donald Trump’s China policy.
The FBI’s role is equally damning. An FBI intelligence report on Chinese fraudulent driver’s licenses was reportedly recalled and deleted in 2020. Gone. Memory-holed. And a group called the Director’s Initiative Group — or DIG — which apparently existed to manage these kinds of sensitive assessments, has since been disbanded.
Intelligence Community Inspector General Christopher Fox is now involved in examining how deep this goes, alongside former National Intelligence Officer for Cyber Christopher Porter, whose earlier work fed into these assessments.
So let’s recap: while the media spent four years telling you that Russian Facebook memes stole the 2016 election, China was actively penetrating state voter databases — and the intelligence community covered it up because Orange Man Bad. We spent tens of millions on the Mueller investigation over Russian “collusion” that never existed, while a real foreign adversary was picking the lock on our election infrastructure and our own spies shrugged.
DNI Gabbard has the evidence now. The question is whether anyone in Washington has the spine to hold these people accountable — or whether we’ll get another round of “mistakes were made” followed by absolutely nothing happening.
