Hundreds of ex-CIA officials question memo behind Trump’s Chinese election interference claims
A group of more than 400 former national security and intelligence officials are calling on Congress to investigate an alleged CIA memo used to support Donald Trump’s claims that China sought to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.
The group fears the document may have been manufactured from “cherry-picked” CIA reports with direct input from the White House before the president’s primetime address on what he called “shocking vulnerabilities” in the nation’s election system.
Tuesday’s letter from The Steady State — a nonpartisan group made up of former officials from the CIA, FBI, State Department, Department of Defense and Homeland Security — says the CIA note includes “a number of anomalies” that don’t identify the office, author, context or definitive conclusion based on the agency’s information, among other issues.
The memo also departs from “typical” CIA style and format, according to the letter, which was sent to congressional intelligence committees and the inspectors general for the CIA and intelligence community. Election officials and voting rights groups fear the president’s address will be used to implement sweeping restrictions on voting ahead of midterm elections.
“It is particularly dangerous when intelligence products are presented piecemeal to the American people,” wrote Steven Cash, the group’s executive director and a former CIA and Homeland Security official. “Confidence in the intelligence community is predicated not only on what it ultimately knows, but on the integrity of how its work is produced and presented.”
The officials say the Trump administration should answer whether the document was compiled based on a narrowly tailored request from the White House.
In his remarks on July 16, which coincided with the release of newly declassified materials, Trump claimed that the nation’s elections are “dangerously” exposed to “hacking, exploitation and foreign interference,” stating without evidence that “deep state” agents had worked to conceal intelligence supporting his claims.
Those agents “worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible,” Trump said in his remarks.
He then quoted from one of the newly declassified documents, stating that the Chinese government “sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. president.” China would “pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could and they didn’t care what they said,” according to Trump.
That document —“Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018-2020” — is roughly a one-page summary with bullet points. The date and other details are redacted, and it’s unclear where it originated within the CIA.
“This document says, and this is by the CIA, the strategy included efforts to use Chinese contacts with big U.S. companies to influence U.S. business leaders to turn against the president of the United States of America,” Trump said. “The Chinese government wanted the U.S. president to lose the next election.”
Trump pointed to the memo to call on the Department of Justice to “fire those involved in the cover-up” and “file criminal charges if appropriate.”
In their letter to lawmakers and inspectors general, the former intelligence officials said the memo “is probably a cherry-picked compilation based on genuine CIA raw-reporting streams, probably assembled at White House direction for the president’s speech.”
Agency leadership likely routed the findings around CIA analysts to enlist the agency’s Directorate of Operations to draft it, possibly with input from White House officials, while redacting “any accountable feature” from it, the letter states.
