The intelligence community assessment on foreign influence in the 2020 election has been delayed as senior intelligence officials clash over the role played by China and as Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe seeks to include more viewpoints in the final analysis.
This comes four years after an assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election that is still contested by some, and the debates within the intelligence community show growing concern about Chinese Communist Party influence when compared to the Russia-focused report in the last presidential election. The backdrop of the debate is increased concern about Chinese influence against U.S. lawmakers, a massive SolarWinds hack suspected by many to have been conducted by Russia, and President Trump’s refusal to concede to President-elect Joe Biden.
“Ratcliffe has been really clear about his view that China is our top national security threat,” a senior intelligence official told the Washington Examiner. “But ultimately, he’s trying to ensure politics don’t play a role in what makes it into this report. If there are conflicting views among senior analysts about Chinese election influence, he wants both views to get a fair shake in the report.”
Amanda Schoch, the assistant DNI for strategic communications, said Wednesday that “the DNI was notified by career intelligence officials that the Intelligence Community will not meet the Dec. 18 deadline, set by executive order and Congress, to submit the IC’s classified assessment on foreign threats to the 2020 U.S. elections” and that “the IC has received relevant reporting since the election and a number of agencies have not finished coordinating on the product.”
An intelligence source told the Washington Examiner that there is an ongoing debate among senior-level analysts about the role played by China in 2020, with some analysts saying China took numerous steps to influence the election, while others said China’s actions were not necessarily for meddling purposes or that China had plans to meddle but didn’t carry them out. The source contended Ratcliffe doesn’t want to put his thumb on the scale but wants all viewpoints reflected, said there was a lot of intelligence still coming in, and stressed the report is supposed to be about foreign influence but not necessarily about whether any voters’ minds were actually changed. The report will not focus on claims of mail-in fraud or unfounded allegations of voting machines flipping millions of votes.
Bloomberg first reported Wednesday that Ratcliffe wants the report to “more fully reflect the national security threat that China’s efforts posed.” The intelligence source stressed to the Washington Examiner that Ratcliffe wants to ensure proper analytic tradecraft is employed related to China’s influence.
“DNI Ratcliffe is standing up for career analysts who want their views to be accurately reflected,” Ric Grenell, the former acting DNI, tweeted on Wednesday. “In other words, fighting to keep intelligence from being politicized.”
Ratcliffe provided a glimpse into the internal debates within the intelligence community this month, telling the Washington Examiner that “you have analysts that have been here from the Cold War era and are used to it being Russia, or in the last 20 years, it has been about counterterrorism — and again, I’m not minimizing those — but the greatest threat that we face and a greater amount of our focus needs to be on China.”
Former CIA Director John Brennan revealed this year that he overruled two CIA officers who disagreed with him during the creation of the January 2017 assessment about his high level of confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in 2016 with the specific goal of helping elect then-candidate Trump.
The 2017 assessment from the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI concluded with “high confidence” that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference” for Trump. Adm. Mike Rogers of the NSA diverged from Brennan and FBI Director James Comey on one key aspect, expressing only “moderate” rather than “high” confidence that Putin “aspired to help” Trump’s election chances through “discrediting” Clinton.
Brennan told C-SPAN’s Book TV that two CIA officers “talked to me about” their belief that he was wrong to be so confident about Putin’s motivations. “It was apparent to me … that they had not read all the intelligence that I had read, so my own view was to support the analysts,” Brennan said, adding, “I didn’t change a single analytic judgment.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report in April defending the 2017 assessment, finding that the assessment “presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis” and that “the differing confidence levels on one analytic judgment are justified.”
But the Senate findings clash with a 2018 report from the House Intelligence Committee, chaired then by California Republican Devin Nunes, which said it “identified significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments regarding Putin’s strategic objectives.” Ratcliffe sent the intelligence community’s watchdog an investigative referral on that House report in October.
Attorney General William Barr confirmed this summer that now-special counsel John Durham’s inquiry into the Russia investigation includes a deep dive into the 2017 assessment. Durham is said to have scrutinized Brennan along with the FBI in relation to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier, which ended up in the assessment’s classified annex. The Atlantic reported that Brennan “bets” that Durham will “criticize him for a decision … to overrule two CIA case officers.”
Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
Ratcliffe told CBS News this month “not that we’ve been able to determine” when asked if any foreign adversary had the ability to change the 2020 vote results. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other election groups said last month that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, released the intelligence community’s initial assessment on foreign interference in August, warning that “many foreign actors have a preference for who wins the election” though “covert influence efforts are rarer.” He said Russia was “using a range of measures to primarily denigrate” Biden, noting that Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach was “spreading claims about corruption … to undermine” Biden. He also said Iran sought “to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, President Trump, and to divide the country in advance of the 2020 elections.”
“We assess that China prefers that President Trump, whom Beijing sees as unpredictable, does not win reelection,” Evanina said. “China has been expanding its influence efforts ahead of November 2020 to shape the policy environment in the United States, pressure political figures it views as opposed to China’s interests, and deflect and counter criticism of China.”
The counterintelligence official said China’s “public rhetoric over the past few months has grown increasingly critical of the current administration’s COVID-19 response, closure of China’s Houston Consulate, and actions on other issues.” Evanina said China “recognizes that all of these efforts” could affect the election, and the intelligence community debate now centers on whether and how China’s actions were designed to influence 2020.
Trump administration officials contend China posed the biggest election meddling problem in 2020. Ratcliffe told the Washington Examiner in August that “China poses a greater national security threat to the U.S. than any other nation … and that includes threats of election influence.” Barr told CNN in September that “I believe it’s China” when asked which country was most assertive with election interference. Democratic House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff called Barr’s comments “flat-out false.” When asked about Barr’s analysis, national security adviser Robert O’Brien said, “I agree with him, 100%.”
Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray also held a press conference in late October warning Russia and Iran gained access to U.S. voter registration information, and Ratcliffe said Iran was sending spoofed emails pretending to be Proud Boys, which was designed to damage Trump. The spy chief also weighed in in October to dismiss the idea that the Hunter Biden laptop story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
