The Trump administration dropped a big batch of declassified election intelligence documents Thursday night, and as USA Journal reported, the contents are not exactly what you would call flattering to the people who were supposedly keeping America informed about foreign threats to the 2020 election.
Let's get the important caveat out of the way first: these documents do not show that voting machines were flipped or that ballots were stuffed. If you came here looking for that, you will leave disappointed. What they do show might actually be worse in some ways, because it means the people we pay to tell us the truth about national security threats decided to do a little creative editing instead.
A declassified CIA note covering 2018 through 2020 states that China wanted Trump to lose the 2020 election. According to the document, Beijing's strategy starting in mid-2019 included targeting swing states with resources, identifying American journalists who had written negatively about Trump and paying them to write more, and using Chinese contracts with major U.S. companies to pressure business leaders to turn against the administration.
"The Chinese Government wanted the U.S. President to lose the next election," one CIA note stated. That is a direct quote from a declassified intelligence document. Not a rumor. Not a podcast theory. A CIA assessment.
Now here is where it gets really fun. Journalist Benjamin Weingarten flagged an email thread from the document release showing intelligence officials debating the language of their public China assessment in real time. They struck a sentence about China seeking to topple Trump and replaced it with language saying China had no electoral preference. So the internal version said China was actively working to defeat the sitting president, and the public version said China was basically neutral. Someone just hit the delete key on the inconvenient part and called it a day.
The version that told the truth stayed classified until Thursday night. The version that was, shall we say, diplomatically adjusted is the one the American public got to see. Nothing says transparency like rewriting your own conclusions before showing them to the country.
A National Intelligence Council memorandum from January 2020 assessed that manipulating vote tabulation systems at a scale large enough to change national results would be difficult and that audits would likely catch large-scale fraud. That is worth noting honestly. However, the same memorandum confirmed that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all possessed the capability to compromise election infrastructure.
Then there is the DHS document, which found over 250,000 non-citizens illegally registered to vote across just four states where public data was reviewed. Not all of them voted, but those voter rolls are about as clean as a gas station bathroom.
The documents are available at the White House website for anyone who wants to read them. The overall picture is not of some Hollywood heist. It is of an election environment where documented foreign interference was happening, the intelligence community knew about it, and certain officials inside that community decided the public did not need to know the full story. Which is a heck of a thing to discover five years later on a Thursday night.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
