2020 US election: FBI blocked probe into 'Chinese meddling', documents show - who was being shielded?
Joe Biden
, aiming to shield then-FBI Director Christopher Wray as it would "contradict" his congressional testimony, Fox News Digital reported citing newly declassified FBI documents.
The documents, containing exchanges between FBI officials prior to the 2020 election, were recently declassified by FBI director Kash Patel and sent to senate judiciary committee chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa.
What do the documents reveal?
According to the report, Chinese government created 'a large amount' of fake US driver's licenses, generated using data from millions of TikTok users, 'tens of thousands of Chinese students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party to vote for US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden, despite not being eligible to vote in the United States,' the New York Post reported.
Moreover, the FBI's Albany field office reported the plot from a credible source, but FBI headquarters "suppressed" the report, partly because it would "contradict" director Wray's congressional testimony claiming no coordinated national voter fraud.
Internal communications showed Albany staff protested the suppression, warning that political motives were influencing intelligence handling and that the suppression prevented other agencies from vetting the information.
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Recall of probe report 'abnormal'
Details of the alleged meddling were shared in an FBI Intelligence Information Report (IIR) on September 25, 2020, just a day after Wray told Congress the bureau had no knowledge of any 'coordinated national voter fraud effort'. The report, however, was withdrawn within minutes of being released.
Calling the move "abnormal", FBI assistant director Marshall Yates, in a letter to Chuck Grassley earlier this year said, 'Based on conversations with key individuals involved, it was conveyed that the recall of the IIR was abnormal.'
Yates had said that the probe report had "prompted significant attention throughout FBI Headquarters" and "the recall was issued to 'reinterview' the source."
"The rationale provided to Albany staff for the recall was that Headquarters deemed the report not 'authoritative,' but this characterization was met with disagreement by those in the Albany office. Internal emails reflect that Albany staff had concerns that suppressing the IIR would be 'dangerous if we cite potential political implications as reasons for not putting out our information,' emphasizing that it was not the role of analysts to align intelligence with public testimony," he wrote in the letter.
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