In a New York Times magazine interview published on June 1, 2020, then-Attorney General Bill Barr acknowledged that the Department of Justice was concerned that "there are a number of foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots, put names on them, send them in."

Weeks later, President Donald Trump tweeted: "RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!"

Election officials, Democrats, and the liberal media were quick to suggest that such claims weren't just "unfounded" — they were "preposterous."

Like the American liberal establishment, these strategic dismissals have not aged well.

FBI Director Kash Patel announced Monday that the bureau located intelligence reports from August 2020 that detail "alarming allegations" regarding an apparent Chinese communist plot to interfere in the presidential election for the benefit of then-candidate Joe Biden.

Nearly as damning as the allegations was their alleged cover-up by elements of the intelligence community ahead of the election.

Patel told Just the News that the newly declassified documents "include allegations of plans from the [Chinese Communist Party] to manufacture fake driver's licenses and ship them into the United States for the purpose of facilitating fraudulent mail-in ballots — allegations which, while substantiated, were abruptly recalled and never disclosed to the public."

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced on July 27, 2020, that between Jan. 1 and June 30 of that election year, CBP officers at the International Mail Facility at Chicago O'Hare International Airport had seized 1,513 shipments containing fraudulent documents, including 19,888 counterfeit U.S. drivers' licenses.

"The majority of these shipments were arriving from China and Hong Kong, with other seized shipments arriving from Great Britain and South Korea," noted CBP.

The licenses were mostly intended for college-age students across various states. In many cases, the barcode attached to the licenses actually worked. It's unclear whether some of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese students at universities across the country or some of the nearly 400,000 Chinese illegal aliens were the intended recipients.

"These fraudulent identity documents can lead to identity theft, worksite enforcement, critical infrastructure protection, fraud linked to immigration-related crimes such as human smuggling and human trafficking, and these documents can be used by those individuals associated with terrorism to minimize scrutiny from travel screening measures," added CBP.

Officials who have seen the newly declassified documents told Just the News that a confidential source provided the FBI with information in summer 2020 indicating that the Chinese communist regime was mass-producing fake American drivers' licenses in order to create voter identities for Chinese nationals so that they could vote with fake mail-in ballots.

The goal was apparently to help Biden beat Trump.

An intelligence official indicated that despite the gravity of the allegations, the intel report was recalled after just a few weeks and the allegations never fully explored.

'It was a deliberate effort by the Intelligence Community to hide these facts from the public.'

The reason given was that the confidential source needed to be re-interviewed. However, it appears politics may have informed the decision.

The intelligence community's then-analytic ombudsman Barry Zulauf indicated in a report on a number of election security intelligence issues that "China analysts appeared hesitant to assess Chinese actions as undue influence or interference. These analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tended to disagree with the [Trump] Administration's policies, saying in effect, 'I don't want our intelligence used to support those policies.'"

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In a Jan. 7, 2021, memo, then-DNI and current CIA Director John Ratcliffe directed the attention of senators on the Select Committee on Intelligence to how the ombudsman found that "CIA Management took actions 'pressuring [analysts] to withdraw their support' from the alternative viewpoint on China 'in an attempt to suppress it. This was seen by National Intelligence Officers as politicization,’ and I agree.”

Ratcliffe went on to defend Christopher Porter — the former national intelligence officer for cyber at the National Intelligence Council, who led the U.S. intelligence community's analysis of threats to American elections — for refusing to back down from flagging the threat of Chinese election interference. Contrary to the supposed majority view, Porter apparently maintained that “China took at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances.”

Porter, who expressed his gratitude on Tuesday that Patel "is standing up for the truth senior Intelligence Community leaders conspired to hide,” claimed that the CIA and senior leadership at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence harassed him and drove him out of the building when he said that China had interfered in 2020.

"Just remember, this wasn’t an oversight: it was a deliberate effort by the Intelligence Community to hide these facts from the public so President Trump couldn’t defend his campaign for reelection," added Porter.

The ombudsman took pains to explain that "due to varying collection and insight into hostile state actors’ leadership intentions and domestic election influence campaigns, the definitional use of the terms 'influence' and 'interference' and associated confidence levels are applied differently by the China and Russia analytic communities.”

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Zulauf suggested further that the difference in application of these analytic terms led to "differences in the volume, frequency, and confidence levels of the intelligence coming from the China and Russia analytic communities," though they were "very similar in their potential effects."

In his report, Zulauf found that "there were attempts to politicize intelligence."

Zulauf referred to several examples, "the most egregious" of which was delivered by National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director Bill Evanina on March 10, 2020. Evanina delivered remarks that were construed as the opinion of the IC, yet analysts called the introductory statement and talking points a “gross misinterpretation” of the IC’s views.

The ombudsman also highlighted “what appears to be politically motivated editing” of a May 2020 National Intelligence Council Memo in what he described as one example of “the overall pattern of perceived politicization.”

Then-National Intelligence Chair Christopher Kojm, who later ended up on Biden’s presidential transition Agency Review Team, “crafted the language” of the memo, which reportedly “led with intelligence gaps and ‘buried the lead’ regarding what the IC does know about election security threats.”

“The result was a final product whose delayed publication meant it diverged sharply from the up-to-date IC view communicated in other product lines,” wrote Zulauf. “I have e-mail exchanges to document this delay, allusions to political repercussions, and frustration from intelligence professionals with the delay.”

“NIC officials pointed to ODNI senior officials as intervening in the changes to conclusions, saying that they were overly sensitive to political customers who saw the dissonance between China and Russia reporting and the inconsistent application of definitions,” added Zulauf.

The alleged cover-up of the Chinese election fraud plot appears to be par for the course within what the ombudsman referred to as this “hyper partisan state” of play.

It appears this narrative curation ultimately proved successful.

In March 2021, the National Intelligence Council released an assessment report stating with high confidence that “China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

'They should be investigating and getting this ready for prosecution.'

The report noted further that the intelligence community had “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

Patel told Just the News he declassified the intel documents pertaining to the August 2020 intel report and provided them to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for further review.

The news of the documents’ location and declassification was well received by a number of Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Ana Paulina Luna (Fla.), who stated, “America needs to wake up. Trump is NOT the enemy, it’s the CCP.”

Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, suggested to Blaze News that “a limited disclosure to Congress is not sufficient.”

“They’re the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” continued Howell. “They should be investigating and getting this ready for prosecution.”

Blaze News reached out to the ODNI and the White House but did not immediately receive responses. When pressed for comment, the FBI referred Blaze News to Patel's post on X.

Mike Howell is a contributor to Blaze News.

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