Ex-CIA Agent Reveals Secret Emails on Buried China Evidence in Trump Election Files

Donald Trump’s primetime address on alleged election fraud drew a wary response Thursday night, including from some of the former president’s most loyal political allies.

In the speech, Trump claimed China had unlawfully obtained 220 million American voter files as part of what he described as the largest election interference operation in history. The accusation revived themes from his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden, though no evidence of voting fraud has been established.

His claims about “deep state” figures inside the U.S. intelligence community were handled cautiously by major television networks and by newspaper editors preparing Friday’s front pages.

But a former CIA officer told the Daily Mail that the debate in Washington may be overlooking a more significant issue contained in the newly released files.

One declassified intelligence report stated that a Chinese military unit operating from Beijing had attempted to influence the 2020 U.S. election.

A year earlier, a senior intelligence officer had raised concerns about the same alleged activity, but that assessment was treated as a minority view.

When the intelligence community reached its conclusion in 2021, that same officer reportedly questioned why the evidentiary standard appeared to have changed — and why it had taken a full year to get there.

The former CIA agent who spoke with the Daily Mail said the deeper concern was not simply the finding itself, but what the intelligence community allegedly did afterward, accusing officials of “putting their thumb on the scales” to suppress it.

‘The most damning part,’ the former agent said, is in the ‘snippets of those emails that go back and forth’ as analysts fought over how much of the China threat to play down. 

None of it means the 2020 result was changed as nothing in the declassified files proves a past vote was altered. The same material judged that any foreign attempt to swing the vote would struggle to reach the scale needed to flip a national result, because US elections are run locally by states and counties. 

A National Intelligence Council report judged China’s activity around the 2020 election ‘low-level’ and confined to ‘exploratory steps,’ and Trump’s own appointees at the DNI said afterwards that Beijing had weighed interfering and held back. 

But the former agent told the Daily Mail that Trump had demonstrated ‘there was real evidence that was purposely withheld from the executive by elements within the IC.’ 

‘It’s hard to believe that your own CIA would work against you on something … or change the evidence to work against you,’ said the agent, who served under four administrations before retiring during the Biden era.

The fight plays out across two declassified email chains.

A National Intelligence Officer argued in December 2020 that China had run an election-influence operation aimed at the vote, in a minority view attached to the community’s assessment. 

But Nikki Floris, of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, pressed for the dissent to be held to the same standard as the rest of the assessment and kept out of its key judgments, calling that ‘an absolute red line for the FBI.’

Floris also objected to elevating the claim that Beijing ‘intended’ to sway US candidates.

‘The IC has repeatedly stated, based on a body of intelligence, there is no evidence of said intention, though we note there was an awareness of this potential effect,’ she wrote. 

When the officer assessed that China ‘may’ also have encouraged US protests, Floris was blunter. ‘There is no evidence of this in the reporting … This is highly misleading and a misrepresentation of the underlying reports,’ she wrote. 

Intelligence assessments require a high-level of vetting to ensure their contents are verifiable. They are often completed with the sign-off from various officers spanning the government’s 18 different intelligence agencies. 

But the former CIA agent told the Daily Mail that some of the newly revealed discussions show how IC members ‘were already politicizing raw intelligence.’

The dissent was downgraded in 2020 around the fraught election. A year later it resurfaced, but this time with more credibility. 

A National Intelligence Officer for Cyber, who appears to be the same dissenter, flagged in a December 2021 email that a fresh IC report was now pinning the identical activity on ‘the Chinese military’ and calling it an election-influence unit tied to Beijing.

In 2020, the IC had said it did not know who was behind it.

‘We should consider how this looks and on what logical, non-partisan basis the IC makes calls one way or the other,’ he wrote. 

‘Why is this unit engaged in election influence … ‘to promote China’s interests’ but when they do it here [in the US] it’s ‘issue influence’ but somehow not election-related? It’s the same personnel doing the same kind of activity,’ he added.

Trump directly addressed China’s intentions on Thursday, claiming that Beijing wanted him to lose to Biden.

‘The Chinese government wanted [the] US president to lose the next election, and the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them, charged them billions and billions of dollars worth of tariffs,’ Trump said. 

‘The People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files,’ the President alleged.

‘That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data,’ he added. Trump alleged that a ‘data exploitation unit’ in China was assigned to hijack the data.  

Trump likened the operation to an ‘unprecedented election security nightmare.’

White House spokesman Davis Ingle said: ‘President Trump and millions of Americans agree that we must have integrity in our elections, otherwise we have no country at all. Congress should immediately pass the SAVE America Act.’

The FBI and the CIA have been contacted for comment.