Vindicated? Patel's FBI uncovers apparent Chinese communist plot to rig 2020 mail-in vote for Biden



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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Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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.”

RELATED: Chinese official avows Beijing is behind cyberattacks on US, identifies motive: Report

Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

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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How the National Intelligence University became a diploma mill for intel amateurs



The National Intelligence University, a kludge organization masquerading as an institution of higher learning, is likely the organization that seeded some of the bozos over at National Security Agency who were busy sexting instead of decrypting. As all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies send their mid-career personnel (civilian and military both) to NIU for continuing education, you can bet that at least some of the chief exporters of the extremist DEI nonsense that took hold at NSA and elsewhere were graduates of NIU.

The Department of Government Efficiency should pay a visit to the NIU campus (really just one building) in Bethesda, Maryland. The institution needs a thorough review — not necessarily to eliminate it but to scale back its most ineffective parts and personnel. The goal should be to restore the focus on meaningful instruction and improve the quality of its graduates.

NIU is as dysfunctional as the broader American higher education system — and for the same reasons. It doesn’t have to be this way.

NIU’s executive vice president, Patricia A. Larsen,has aggressively expanded DEI initiatives while neglecting common sense and academic rigor. Her approach puts the sensitivity of students over effective instruction, often at the expense of the faculty and staff. God forbid that any instruction ruffle the feathers of our delicate and sensitive intelligence community students! As a result, the quality of both incoming intelligence personnel and graduating students has declined sharply.

Since 1992, I have lectured at NIU and its predecessor organizations — the Defense Intelligence College, the Joint Military Intelligence College, and later the National Defense Intelligence College. Over the years, I have witnessed a significant drop in the quality of students and their academic preparedness.

Since 2021, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence took control of the university, the institution has adopted an inflated sense of its own importance (doubtless with some input from the CIA). The ODNI lacked a clear plan for the university and had little understanding of its curriculum. This mismanagement, combined with a shift toward imitating civilian higher education practices, has severely undermined NIU’s standards.

Now, it wants to emulate prestigious schools like Harvard or Virginia Tech, but, in reality, it more closely resembles a military staff school or community college.

NIU’s current approach includes lax, student-centered learning policies that allow students to influence what is taught. Admission standards have dropped sharply — the university no longer requires GRE scores and accepts nearly everyone who applies. Many students and graduates struggle with basic writing skills, such as forming coherent sentences with proper subject-verb agreement. Grade inflation is rampant, with 4.0 GPAs now the norm.

Today, NIU attracts government edu-crats who rely on PowerPoint slides rather than effective teaching methods. It has also become a degree mill for students who lack writing and reasoning skills. In the past, I reviewed their unclassified theses and papers, which often consisted of fragmented sentences on slides written in text-message shorthand — hardly graduate-level work.

The university’s staff has also grown bloated, consisting mostly of non-teaching personnel who try to mimic large state universities. This is absurd given that NIU’s student body is smaller than that of many medium-sized high schools. Entire departments contribute nothing to the university’s core mission: providing high-quality, graduate-level education in strategic intelligence.

Worse, management at NIU has long focused on increasing the number of graduates, regardless of their competence, instead of producing fewer but better-prepared intelligence professionals. A search of the public course catalog reveals no instruction in ethics. The emphasis on quantity over quality risks corrupting the entire intelligence community.

This lack of standards may help explain why the intelligence community includes hundreds of people like those Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired last week from the National Security Agency for using classified systems to exchange lewd and obscene messages. If NIU enforced higher standards in reading, writing, reasoning, and ethics, it might produce graduates with the integrity, discipline, and dedication that once defined both military officers and intelligence personnel. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case today.

As a result, NIU is as dysfunctional as the broader American higher education system — and for the same reasons. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The DOGE and Gabbard must take decisive action to clean up the NIU. After Gabbard’s swift move to fire the NSA employees involved in misconduct, it’s clear that bold steps can yield results.

To prevent further decline in the intelligence community, the DOGE and Gabbard should conduct a thorough review and eliminate unnecessary activities and staff positions that do not directly contribute to effective teaching. NIU’s focus must return to preparing the next generation of intelligence professionals with the skills needed for the art and craft of intelligence work.

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The D.C. bar wants to indefinitely deprive Jeff Clark of practicing law because he prioritized election integrity under Trump.

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Anonymous intelligence officer says he likes crossdressing, claims it made him 'A BETTER OFFICER'



An anonymous intelligence officer wrote that he likes wearing women's apparel and believes crossdressing has turned him into "A BETTER OFFICER," according to a piece in "The Dive" magazine obtained by the Daily Wire via a Freedom of Information Act request.

"I am an intelligence officer, and I am a man who likes to wear women's clothes sometimes. I think my experiences as someone who crossdresses have sharpened the skills I use as an intelligence officer, particularly critical thinking and perspective-taking," the individual wrote in the piece. "I think of my gender identity as fixed," he noted, adding, "and male, even though I like to wear dresses sometimes."

He claimed that his penchant for wearing women's clothing has made him a better officer in various ways.

"I'm better now at understanding foreign actors," the man asserted. "I'm better at understanding clandestine assets and their motivations."

"I'm more aware of, and hopefully supporting, my women colleagues," he claimed. "I know firsthand how wearing heels can make your feet hurt and make it take longer to walk somewhere. Although I like wearing a bra, I know it isn't comfortable for everyone, and is less comfortable after a few hours."

He noted that his crossdressing is distracting for people but suggested that this should not be the case.

"Every IC resource I found on dress codes suggests that dressing professionally, in any clothing, is the goal, so your clothes do not distract from what you're trying to do. When I crossdress, it still distracts people, even though it is professional. It is my hope that we can learn to accept a wider range of gender identities and expressions. Let's choose ... to not to be distracted by what other people wear, to accept them, and get on with our vital work," he wrote.

According to the Daily Wire, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence noted, "The IC Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (IC DEIA) Office manages the IC's efforts to build a diverse and inclusive workforce, and as part of their work, they distribute The Dive, a quarterly magazine, to each IC element's DEIA office and/or Equal Employment Opportunity office."

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Biden administration begs to keep spying on American citizens despite concerns over abuses



Elements of the intelligence community implored the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act so that the Biden administration can continue spying on American citizens' private communications.

Top officials from the FBI, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Justice described 702 as "invaluable" and "indispensable," at times invoking the 9/11 Islamist attacks on the United States as lasting justification for far-reaching warrantless surveillance, even though thousands and possibly even millions of Americans may have been caught up in the resulting dragnet.

Deputy directors George Barnes of the NSA, David Cohen of the CIA, and Paul Abbate of the FBI issued a joint statement along with Chris Fonzone, general counsel with the ODNI, and Matthew Olsen, assistant attorney general for the DOJ's National Security Division, claiming 702 "helps protect Americans" every day, sparing them from "terrorist plots, weapons of mass destruction, malicious cyber activity, and hostile state behavior from China and Russia."

The intel officials suggested 702 is not only "an elegant solution to an operational challenge created by the advent of the Internet" but a "cornerstone of our Intelligence Community's efforts to identify and understand a broad range of challenges our country faces in an increasingly complex and dangerous world."

They further indicated that 246,073 targets were authorized for "collection" under 702 last year alone.

Section 702 is a provision of FISA enacted by Congress in 2008 that enables the government to spy on foreign nationals located outside the United States with the coerced aid of electronic communication service providers.

According to the ODNI, Section 702 was necessary because by the mid-2000s, "many terrorists and other foreign adversaries were using email accounts serviced by U.S. companies. Because of this change in communications technology, the government had to seek individual court orders, based on a finding of probably cause, to obtain the communications of non-U.S. persons located abroad."

Going through the courts "proved costly because of the resources required and because the government couldn't always meet the probable cause standard, which was designed to protect U.S. persons and persons in the U.S."

While allegedly intended to zero in on foreign nationals abroad "who are expected to possess, receive, or communicate foreign intelligence information," the FBI acknowledges that those targeted "may send an email or have a phone call with a U.S. person."

Accordingly, under Section 702, Americans can be subject to warrantless surveillance and have their phone calls, text messages, emails, and other communications both tapped and stored as a consequence of 702.

The New York Times reported that the data belonging to Americans spied on without a warrant is generally stored by the government for five years and can be searched by analysts at the aforementioned agencies by using Americans' identifiers, such as names, Social Security numbers, passport numbers, and email addresses, as query terms.

Critics of 702 suggest that these queries provide the state with the ability to circumnavigate the Fourth Amendment's requirement that the government first acquire a warrant before violating citizens' privacy.

The Times noted that an audit released in December revealed a number of instances in which "F.B.I. analysts queried the Section 702 repository using Americans' identifiers for unapproved reasons, such as vetting potential informants or maintenance workers."

During Tuesday's hearing, the FBI admitted there had been 278,000 "unintentional" back-door search queries of the 702 database for the private communications of Americans between 2020 and 2021 alone.

According to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, various Jan. 6 protesters, 19,000 donors to a Congressional campaign, and BLM protesters were among those subjected to the warrantless searches, reported the Register.

Despite the widespread and routine abuse of 702, Abbate maintained it was still worth preserving.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), on the committee, later noted, "FBI’s tone on FISA was shockingly defiant and at times indignant at today’s hearing. That’s really something for an agency that has admitted to 278,000 'accidental' warrantless searches of American citizens."

The Utah senator stressed that Americans' constitutional rights were being violated and the intelligence agencies' track record of abuse left little hope that their proposed reforms would make a difference, even if executed in the first place.

\u201c\ud83e\uddf5 Why should we ever trust the @FBI & @TheJusticeDept to fix its own problems internally?\u201d
— Mike Lee (@Mike Lee) 1686674155

Lee later tweeted, "Democrats and Republicans agree that FBI can’t be trusted to wield its FISA authority responsibly. It’s time to clip FBI’s wings. I’m working on bipartisan FISA reforms to protect Americans from warrantless 'backdoor' FISA searches.'"

"The FBI has, right now, an unlimited hubris that you believe you are unaccountable," committee member Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said during the hearing. "You don’t believe you’re accountable to the United States Congress, and you don’t believe you’re accountable to the American people, and you are doing damage."

While Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) admitted 702 "has been abused," he suggested that Congress "reauthorize this program and build in some safeguards," reported the Register.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, "I will only support the reauthorization of Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act if there are significant reforms. ... And that means first and foremost, addressing the warrantless surveillance of Americans in violation of the Fourth Amendment."

Top FBI, DOJ Officials Grilled About Biden Whistleblower, FISA Abuse In Senate Judiciary Committee youtu.be

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Long-awaited US intelligence report on UAPs says 143 out of 144 UFO sightings are unexplainable



The highly-anticipated U.S. intelligence report on UFOs was released on Friday, but offered few answers to sightings of mysterious unidentified aerial phenomena.

The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence finally made public its preliminary assessment on UAPs, which revealed the U.S. government reported 144 incidents of UFOs spotted between November 2004 to March 2021. However, 143 UAPs remain unexplainable. The ODNI could only identify one UAP, which was determined to be a large, deflating balloon.

There were 18 incidents in which witnesses said they saw "unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics."

The ODNI characterized the UAP incidents into five categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall "other" bin.

"Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion," the report reads. "In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings."

"In a limited number of incidents, UAP reportedly appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics," the report states. "These observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and require additional rigorous analysis."

"The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the report says. "The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) considered a range of information on UAP described in U.S. military and IC (Intelligence Community) reporting, but because the reporting lacked sufficient specificity, ultimately recognized that a unique, tailored reporting process was required to provide sufficient data for analysis of UAP events."

"We quite frankly have a bit of work yet to do in order to truly assess and address the threat posed by UAP," a senior U.S official said Friday. "Not all UAP are the same thing."

"This report is an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step. The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern," Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the ranking member and former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said.

"We should approach these questions without preconceptions to encourage a thorough, systematized analysis of the potential national security and flight safety risks posed by unidentified aerial phenomena, whether they are the result of a foreign adversary, atmospheric or other aerial phenomena, space debris, or something else entirely," Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said.

There is no definitive proof that the UFO sightings are aliens. Officials are concerned that the unidentified flying objects could be security threats from other countries.

"Today's rather inconclusive report only marks the beginning of efforts to understand and illuminate what is causing these risks to aviation in many areas around the country and the world," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said.

"We have no clear indications that there is any nonterrestrial explanation for them — but we will go wherever the data takes us," a senior U.S. government official said. "We do not have any data that indicates that any of these unidentified air phenomena are part of a foreign collection program nor do we have any data that is indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary."

"It is critical that the United States maintain operations security and safety at DoD ranges," Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in a memo. "To this end, it is equally critical that all U.S. military aircrews or government personnel report whenever aircraft or other devices interfere with military training. This includes the observation and reporting of UAPs."

"It's clear that we need to improve our capacity to further analyze remaining UAP observations, even as we accept that there are some limits to our capacity to characterize and understand some of the observations that we have," one official said.

Over the next three months, the Department of Defense will develop a new strategy for collecting and tracking information on UAPs.

Obama was briefed on unverified Russian report claiming Clinton approved plan to tie Trump to Putin and DNC hack

President Barack Obama was briefed in the summer of 2016 about an unverified Russian intelligence analysis which claimed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was then the Democratic presidential nominee, approved an effort to tie candidate Donald Trump to Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee, the nation's top spy chief revealed on Tuesday.