A document from the FBI containing allegations that China intervened in the 2020 U.S. presidential election has been made public, leading the U.S. Senate to formally initiate an investigation. U.S. President Donald Trump and his associates have claimed that China manipulated the election results in favor of former President Joe Biden, and the public release of FBI evidence has lent credence to Trump's assertions, which have previously been dismissed as conspiracy theories.
According to foreign media including Fox News, Kash Patel with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declassified a report regarding the potential for Chinese interference in the 2020 presidential election on the 17th (local time) and shared it with U.S. senators. This was done at the request of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (Republican), and the Senate immediately began an inquiry into the matter.
Grassley's office disclosed to Newsweek, a U.S. news magazine, that the document is a confidential intelligence report (IIR) prepared in September 2020 at the FBI office in Albany, New York. Grassley’s spokesperson noted, "This document raises serious national security concerns that the FBI must thoroughly investigate."
The declassified document states, "In late August 2020, the Chinese government manufactured a large number of counterfeit U.S. driver's licenses and secretly transported them to the United States," adding, "Thousands of Chinese students without voting eligibility and immigrants cooperating with the Communist Party were able to vote for candidate Biden at the time using these counterfeit licenses."
In August 2020, some U.S. media reported that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized about 20,000 counterfeit U.S. driver's licenses solely at Chicago O'Hare International Airport during the first half of 2020, most of which were shipped from China and Hong Kong. However, due to the lack of official government announcements and follow-up actions, allegations of Chinese interference in the election remained mere suspicions. The recently declassified FBI document is said to have been prepared months after the large seizure of counterfeit licenses in Chicago. However, it remains unclear how the seized counterfeit licenses are directly related to the contents of the FBI document.
The FBI document also mentions that the social media (SNS) TikTok, operated by the corporation ByteDance, was used to create counterfeit driver's licenses. The document stated, "China collected personal information from U.S. users, including names, identification numbers, and addresses, from millions of TikTok accounts," and added, "This enabled the creation of counterfeit licenses using real Americans' information."
Meanwhile, the released document includes allegations that former FBI Director Christopher Wray ignored suspicions of Chinese interference in the U.S. presidential election. The document states that on September 25, 2020, the FBI "withdrew" information included in the report, which was written the day after Wray testified before Congress that the FBI had found no evidence of election fraud.
Kash Patel, the current FBI Director, told Newsweek that the document contains claims that the Chinese Communist Party produced counterfeit driver's licenses to deliver to the U.S. and that these were intended to manipulate mail-in voting. He noted, "These claims have been proven true, but were suddenly retracted (by the FBI leadership at the time) and buried."
Senator Grassley is demanding a thorough investigation regarding the decision to retract the document under the pretext that the FBI is re-examining its informants, which resulted in the removal of all copies of the original report and the original report itself from computers. Grassley has requested Director Patel to explain the measures the FBI took to ascertain the authenticity of the document, who was responsible for its retraction, and the grounds for the retraction.