Documents that President Donald Trump ordered released don’t support his sweeping claims made during a primetime address on Thursday that China manufactured fake votes for former President Joe Biden in 2020 and that a “deep state” cabal hid China’s activities from him.
A review of the declassified intelligence reports showed that, in fact, his current CIA director, John Ratcliffe, either was part of the deep state plot or failed to discover it when he was Trump’s top intelligence official during his first term. It also showed that Trump was briefed in June 2020 on China’s efforts to influence American politics.
Conspiracies that China took actions to change vote totals in 2020 were investigated and debunked by intelligence and FBI officials during Trump’s first term administration, documents show. Many of the claims in the documents were also not new.
Trump’s Thursday night speech, though, may have already done its intended damage, according to former intelligence officials and election experts. He is using the same playbook he did in 2020: spreading conspiracy theories, describing himself as a victim of plot and refusing to accept election results.
Only this time, his target is the midterm elections.
“He’s buying an option on any election,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If Republicans win, he can say it’s because they fortified elections, and if they lose, that’s proof of his claim that they’re rigged.”
Either way, Trump “wins,” said the former official, “and the country loses trust in a fundamental pillar of our democracy.”
“He’s buying an option on any election,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, referring to Trump. “If Republicans win, he can say it’s because they fortified elections, and if they lose, that’s proof of his claim that they’re rigged.”
Democrats called Thursday’s speech “frightening” and a sign that Trump is on a path toward rejecting the midterm results in November if Republicans stand to lose control of Congress.
That, they fear, would set the country on a path toward another Jan. 6-like confrontation and the further erosion of American democracy.
“His whole speech is designed to be the ‘I told you so’ he needs when he inevitably condemns the elections next November when they deliver political accountability to his failed presidency,” Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told MS NOW.
The faces gathered in front of Trump in the East Room of the White House during his speech also suggested that he is in a more powerful position than he was in 2020.
Gone were key former officials who resisted or declined to be part of his effort to overturn the 2020 election results — Attorney General Bill Barr, FBI Director Chris Wray, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. They have been replaced by Trump loyalists Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, David Warrington and Pete Hegseth.
Former intelligence officials told MS NOW that Trump’s continued use of false “deep state” claims is likely to cause experienced officials to retire early or leave.
A former senior CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fears of retaliation, predicted that the speech would cause fewer people to want to join the CIA and fewer nations to want to share intelligence with it.
“More demoralizing straws on the camel for those hardworking Americans at Langley to accelerate their retirement, for new recruits to think twice about working there,” the former official said. “And for partners and agents to question sharing information with the U.S.”
Jonathan Diaz, the director of voting advocacy at the Campaign Legal Center, an ethics watchdog group, criticized Trump’s tactics but predicted he would fail to derail the midterm elections.
“Declassifying documents, threatening election officials with prosecution, making wildly unsupported claims about voter registration numbers,” Diaz said, referring to Trump’s recent actions. “But just like in 2020, if the president and his allies lose the election, I expect the will of the voters to prevail in the end.”
Here’s a close look at 3 documents Trump released that undermine his election interference claims:
The president’s daily brief
The president’s daily brief, or PDB, is considered highly classified and a collection of the intelligence community’s most sensitive information. It is designed to contain the nation’s most urgent and confident assessments of the threats facing the country and is delivered to the president each day
A PDB declassified by Trump is dated June 25, 2020 —the final year of Trump’s first term. It disproves Trump’s claim in primetime that intelligence officials did not tell him about Chinese efforts to influence American politics.
The heading of the document says, “Beijing Escalating Efforts to Shape US policies on China.” A section that is not redacted discusses warning “a White House official that Beijing had derogatory information on him in an effort to compel him to take a restrained approach to China.”
In his speech, Trump said his daily brief did not include important information about China.
“These were briefings I would get almost every day,” he said. “Everything was kept out that was of importance.”
TikTok and fake driver’s licenses
Trump falsely said in his address that Chinese officials took steps to produce illegal ballots in 2020. The allegation Trump cited was not new and had been released more than a year ago by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R- Iowa. The document is a memo by the FBI’s Albany, New York, office describing an individual with secondhand information.
The individual said an associate said Chinese officials told him Beijing was producing fake U.S. driver’s licenses that could be used to cast fraudulent mail-in ballots for Biden. The person said the Chinese had collected Americans’ addresses from “millions of TikTok accounts.”
But the tip didn’t hold up to scrutiny. In the comments section of the memo, an FBI agent cautioned that TikTok does not require a person’s street address when they create an account.
“A person’s address information was not a valid field when creating a TikTok account,” the agent wrote.
A former senior federal law enforcement official said the report was also deemed unreliable because the person also said Covid-19 was being spread to Americans by secret Chinese-run locations in the U.S.
The former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation, said none of the documents that Trump released show proof that voting machines had been hacked or that vote totals had been changed.
“Nothing in those documents shows anything that would flip an election,” the former official said.
CIA’s unverified intelligence
One of the documents Trump discussed describes a series of startling claims about China. Along with trying to force Trump from power, it said Beijing planned to financially pressure Americans who supported Trump, according to the document. It also said the Chinese government sought to identify journalists who wrote negative stories about Trump and pay them to write more of them.
“What we don’t know is where this sits in the body or reporting, the totality of reporting,” one former U.S. intelligence official. “There might be equal or larger bodies of reporting that either contradict or fail to confirm this information. The sourcing is everything.”
The official noted that a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment that was based on vetted intelligence mentioned none of the allegations. And a dissent by Ratcliffe, then the director of national intelligence, also makes no mention of the claims.
A second former senior US intelligence official said the CIA note simply looks like a memo of selective past reporting, “a summary but not an analytical product,” referring to an intelligence document based on corroborated information and reviewed by analysts who are subject matter experts.
The senior former federal law enforcement official expressed a sense of deep betrayal.
“We went through hell in 2020 protecting the election and to have the very people who were in charge back then now say we were corrupt is sad but not surprising,” the official said. “History will judge what we did.”
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