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President Donald Trump and his allies touted spy reports and emails that he declassified this month as showing a “cover-up” of intelligence about China’s efforts to harm Trump’s re-election prospects in 2020, part of the president’s push to undermine confidence in the integrity of US elections.
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But there was no cover-up, according to a CNN review of the documents and interviews with former senior intelligence officials familiar with election security efforts in 2020.
Instead, the documents show a messy disagreement over intelligence among officials, the kind of discussion that isn’t unusual as experts weigh the value of both raw information and finished intelligence they receive, the former officials said. The declassified material — and the context behind it — also show a stubbornness by some China-focused analysts to fully consider alternative theories about China’s intentions toward the 2020 election, the sources added.
“This was an analytic disagreement, not a cover-up,” said one of the former officials who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
The disclosures don’t change what the majority of the intelligence community concluded after an exhaustive review of intelligence: China considered trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election but chose not to out of fear of upsetting US-China relations.
Those intelligence officials who argued in a minority report that China took some “low-level, exploratory steps” to undermine Trump’s re-election still agreed with the majority conclusion that China did not interfere in the election by affecting people’s ability to cast a ballot.
Trump allies have pointed to an email from an unnamed National Security Agency official in the document dump saying that officials had “deliberately massaged” an intelligence brief for the president to avoid mentioning election issues.
Even former senior intelligence officials who agreed with the minority view on China’s election activity said that email was not evidence of a cover-up. “It’s a word that in this context that didn’t age well, but it’s not a cover-up,” the former senior intelligence official said. “I don’t think they meant this in a nefarious way. It’s more: ‘How do we characterize this?’”
The inclusion in the document dump of raw intelligence that hadn’t been validated could have negative consequences for future intelligence work, some former officials feared.
“Publishing raw intelligence to overrule the analysts inverts the whole process — it stops being intelligence and becomes a domestic political weapon,” Julia Curlee, a former senior CIA analyst who left the agency this year, told CNN. “Partners will share less, and sources will learn that what they risk their lives to collect can end up on a White House website.”
Trump was briefed on intelligence on China’s election activities in 2020, including by the senior intelligence officer who co-authored the minority-report, the former senior officials familiar with election security efforts said. John Ratcliffe, the current CIA director, was sitting atop the intelligence community as Trump’s director of national intelligence in 2020. “I have long publicly highlighted China’s nefarious efforts to influence the 2020 election against President Trump, as evidenced by my dissent to the flawed January 2021 Intelligence Community Assessment,” Ratcliffe said in a statement after the documents were released.
“President Trump and millions of Americans agree that we must have integrity in our elections, otherwise we have no country at all,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said when asked for comment for this story. Ingle pointed to legislation Trump has touted that would implement strict new ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting.
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The declassified documents also include heavily redacted raw intelligence reports on China’s collection of vast swathes of Americans’ personal data, as well as reports on Chinese hacking teams’ growing interest in spying on political campaigns ahead of the 2020 election. Both of those phenomena were widely known and publicly disclosed by US cybersecurity companies during and before 2020.
“China was targeting everything in 2020,” a second former senior intelligence official recalled, referring to a range of cyber-espionage campaigns against various sectors, including US research on the novel coronavirus, that the US government attributed to Chinese intelligence services. Beijing has denied the allegations.
The challenge for US intelligence officials was trying to determine when China’s voracious cyber-espionage veered into election matters.
“If this was Russia, would we think it was election-related?” was a question that intelligence analysts were asking themselves, the second former official said.
Some intelligence officials worried that Trump administration political appointees would overstate publicly what China was doing to influence the 2020 election and equate it with what Russia was doing, which was more aggressive, a third former senior intelligence official said. Trump already had a strained relationship with the intelligence community after it concluded that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election in his favor.
That fear of Trump officials distorting intelligence may have bred a bias in some officials against intelligence showing China did aim to influence the election, the source said.
The way in which the emails and documents were dumped into the public’s lap, shorn of context, will make it harder to have a reasonable public debate about how the intelligence community should operate, former intelligence and national security officials lamented.
The release “appears designed to cherry-pick a mix of raw documentation field reports, internal emails, and broad coverage reporting with egregiously misleading redactions in order to reach Trump’s predetermined outcome,” said Jason Kikta, who during the 2020 election served as a senior official at US Cyber Command, the military’s offensive and defensive cyber command.
The context behind the declassified emails and reports was not included in Trump’s primetime speech in which he claimed that American elections are inadequately secure.
After Russia’s multi-pronged effort to influence the 2016 election via hacks and document leaks caught the US intelligence community off-guard, intelligence agencies were resolved to be ready for whatever foreign adversaries tried in 2020. By the time voting began in 2020, US intelligence reporting on foreign lobbying, hacking and propaganda aimed at the election was substantial. US intelligence and security agencies were regularly releasing to the public their judgements on how Russia, China and Iran might try to affect the election.
“No one wanted to leave a stone unturned and risk a repeat of the 2016 fallout, nor be accused of not sharing potentially relevant information as happened leading up to 9/11,” Kikta said. “What this release purposefully omits is the due diligence that was applied next to determine what was real and what was hypothetical, loose talk, or fanciful ambition.”
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