Following President Trump’s primetime address Thursday night, the White House released four batches of declassified National Intelligence Council (NIC) documents and Intelligence Community assessments that provided further details on foreign threats to the 2020 U.S. election, including election infrastructure vulnerabilities, China’s voter data activities, alleged voter registration fraud in Michigan, and noncitizen voting.
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The documents, declassified by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, provide election integrity intelligence that was withheld in the “flawed” January 2021 Intelligence Community Assessment.
Ratcliffe said in a statement Thursday night that key intelligence reporting showed that Venezuela’s government “had developed capabilities to manipulate electronic voting systems, raising serious concerns for U.S. election infrastructure security.”
He also noted that he had dissented from the “flawed January 2021 Intelligence Community Assessment” that is regularly cited by Democrats and their allies in the media as an irrefutable source.
“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 stated.
“The documents declassified today shed further light on China’s intentions. These matters deserve public scrutiny to ensure our democracy’s foundation—the security and public confidence in our elections—is unassailable.”
The documents on “Vulnerabilities in Electronic Voting and Ballot-Counting Systems” show that in January 2020, an NIC memo warned that U.S. adversaries (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and others) had the capability to compromise election infrastructure, especially centralized voter registration databases, poll books, and some systems. It noted vulnerabilities to data theft or disruption but assessed that wide-scale manipulation of vote tabulation to alter national outcomes would be difficult to achieve undetected, with paper records and audits likely catching large efforts.
However, the documents also show that the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot by the Maduro regime in Venezuela to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020. This intelligence included precise details about methods the regime developed to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected even with an audit.
Another major focus of the declassified docs is China’s large-scale collection of American voter registration information starting around the 2020 cycle. Intelligence indicated Beijing obtained or analyzed data from multiple states (potentially tens of millions of records initially, scaling to over 220 million U.S. voter files by later years). This included names, addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and other details.
A declassified April 2020 NIC memo (“Cyber Operations Enabling Expansive Authoritarianism”) noted Chinese intelligence analyzing U.S. states’ voter registration data for public opinion analysis tied to the 2020 election.
The documents allege that some Intelligence Community (IC) officials suppressed or downplayed the scope of this activity.
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In internal FBI Chat logs, for instance, agents discussed withholding an intelligence report on China from the Presidential Daily Briefing.
“I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point,” said former FBI official Nikki Floris, who was subsequently put in charge of the Intelligence Division of the Washington Field Office by Chris Wray.
Floris is currently Director of Insider Risk at Microsoft, working with Biden’s former Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, who leads Microsoft’s Global Affairs.
A ProPublica investigation last year revealed that the Department of Defense outsourced some of its most sensitive IT maintenance to Microsoft engineers located in mainland China, granting them access to Pentagon systems for years.
The documents show that there was frustration among some NIC analysts at the time over the politicization of intelligence.
Among the disclosures are FBI files detailing evidence of large-scale voter registration fraud in Michigan and how the Biden administration buried the evidence.
Additional documents include a DHS review citing 278,000 cases of noncitizen registrations.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin provided further details on the issue during a press conference, Friday.
“We’ve identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in just four states,” Mullin told reporters. “We also worked with proactive states to identify 28,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls, PLUS 400,000 individuals that are still registered to vote that are deceased.”
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