EXCLUSIVE Kash Patel uncovers proof former FBI bosses buried evidence that China interfered in 2020 election as he vows to take action
The Daily Mail can exclusively report that Patel plans to hand over to Congress on Wednesday proof that former FBI Director Christopher Wray lied to Congress.
Specifically, he will detail how headquarters 'recalled' a report solely because it contradicted Wray's claims under oath to Congress that China was not conducting a foreign influence campaign in U.S. elections.
The FBI field office in Albany, New York produced an Internal Intelligence Report (IRR) that was published and then pulled back without justification, Patel reveals.
FBI bosses at the time shut down this legitimate investigation into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to shield Wray from fallout, sources tell the Daily Mail.
The FBI was investigating at the time the existence of CCP-produced drivers licenses to obtain paper ballots and the Albany office published an IRR on the claims.
They were then told by headquarters to pull the report and pretend it didn't exist, Patel will reveal.
The current Director will tell Congress on Wednesday that the reason the IRR on this investigation was never released was because they admitted that 'the reporting will contradict Director Wray's testimony.'
An FBI official tells the Daily Mail that the current FBI found the IRR and discovered that previous leadership pulled the report.
During a hearing before the Senate in September 2020, then-Director Wray was asked by Republican Sen. Gary Peters whether voting by mail is secure.
'We take all election threats seriously,' Wray said at the time.
'And our role is to investigate the threat accuracy,' he added before insisting: 'Now, we have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it's by mail or otherwise.'
But Patel's new bombshell information claims that this was not true and that Wray lied to Congress while under oath.
Patel vows that there will be accountability for those who tried to bury the report and continue pushing claims that there was no legitimate evidence that the CCP was conducting a foreign influence campaign on the 2020 presidential election.
'Based on our continued review and production of FBI documents related to the CCP's plot to interfere in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, previous FBI leadership chose to play politics and withhold key information from the American people – exposing the weaponization of law enforcement for political purposes during the height of the 2020 election season,' Patel said in a statement with Deputy Director Dan Bongino.
They added: 'This FBI leadership team will continue keeping our promise of aggressive transparency and working around the clock to fix the underlying problems to restore the FBI to the trusted institution the American people deserve.'
Patel will tell Congress that the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) did not approve reissuance of the IRR after it was pulled and then further confirmed by investigators.
'We have found no information to indicate that FITF-China properly investigated the reported information or followed logical investigative leads, despite corroborating intergovernmental reporting,' Patel will reveal on Wednesday.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
13 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Columbia's capitulation to Trump begins a dark new era for US higher education
One of the chauvinistic, self-glorifying myths of American liberalism is that the US has especially strong institutions. In this story, trotted out occasionally since 2016 to reassure those who are worried about Donald Trump's influence, the private and public bodies of American commerce, governance, healthcare and education are possessed of uncommonly robust internal accountability mechanisms, rock-hard rectitude, and a coolly rational self-interest. Trump can only do so much damage to America's economy, culture and way of life, it was reasoned, because these institutions would not bend to his will. They would resist him; they would check his excesses. When forced to choose, as it was always accepted that they one day would be, between Trump's demands and their own principles and purposes, the institutions would always choose themselves. This week put another nail into the coffin of this idea, revealing its valorization of American institutions to be shortsighted and naive. The latest intrusion of reality comes in the form of a deal that Columbia University made with the Trump administration, in which the university made a host of academic, admissions and governance concessions to the Trump regime and agreed to pay a $200m fine in order to restore its federal research funding. The deal marks the formal end of Columbia's academic independence and the dawn of a new era of regulation by deal making, repression and bribery in the field of higher education. The story goes like this. After Columbia became the centerpiece of a nationwide movement of campus encampments in protest of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the university administration began a frantic and at times sadistic crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus speech in an effort to appease congressional Republicans, who had gleefully seized upon the protests to make cynical and unfounded accusations that the universities were engaged in antisemitism. Columbia invited police on to its campus, who rounded up protesting students in mass arrests. This showed that the university would bend to Republican pressure, but did nothing to satisfy its Republican adversaries – who demanded more and more from Columbia, making their attacks on the university the center of their broader war on education, diversity and expertise. When the Trump administration was restored to power in January, the White House partnered with the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration, and the Department of Justice to exert further pressure on Columbia, looking to exert a level of control over the university's internal operations that is unprecedented for a private institution. This time, the university's vast federal research funding – issued in the form of grants that enable university scientists, doctors and academics to make discoveries and pursue knowledge that has enormous implications for American commerce, health and wellbeing – was held hostage. Facing the end of its functioning as a university, Columbia capitulated and went to what was euphemistically called 'the negotiating table' – really, an exchange on the precise terms of its extortion. The deal that resulted gives the Trump administration everything it wants. A Trump-approved monitor will now have the right to review Columbia's admissions records, with the express intent of enforcing a supreme court ban on affirmative action – in other words, ensuring that the university does not admit what the Trump administration deems to be too many non-white students. The Middle Eastern studies department is subject to monitoring, as well, after an agreement in March. The agreement is not a broad-level, generally applicable regulatory endeavor that applies to other universities – although given the scope of the administration's ambitions at Columbia, it is hard to say whether such a regulatory regime would be legal. Instead, it is an individual, backroom deal, one that disregards the institution's first amendment rights and the congressionally mandated protections for its grants in order to proceed with a shakedown. 'The agreement,' writes the Columbia Law School professor David Pozen, 'gives legal form to an extortion scheme.' The process was something akin to a mob boss demanding protection money from a local business. 'Nice research university you have here,' the Trump administration seemed to say to Columbia. 'Would be a shame if something were to happen to it.' That Columbia folded, and sacrificed its integrity, reputation and the freedom of its students and faculty for the federal money, speaks to both the astounding lack of foresight and principle by the university leadership as well as the Trump movement's successful foreclosure of institutions' options for resistance. With the federal judiciary full of Trump appointees – and the supreme court showing itself willing to radically expand executive powers and rapidly diminish the rights of other parties in its eagerness to facilitate Trump's agenda – there is little hope for Columbia, or the other universities that will inevitably be next, to successfully litigate their way out of the administration's threats. But nor does capitulation seem likely to put an end to the Trump administration's demands. The installation of an administration-approved monitor seems poised to offer a toehold from which the government will impose more and more limitations on scholarship, speech and association. There is, after all, no limiting principle to the Trump administration's absolutist expansion of its own prerogatives, and no way for Columbia to ensure that its funding won't be cut off again. The university, in time, will become more what Trump makes it than what its students do. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is likely to use its experience at Columbia as a template to extract substantive concessions and big payouts from other institutions. And these are not just limited to universities. On Thursday, the day after Columbia's capitulation, the Federal Communications Commission approved the merger of Paramount and Skydance. The pending merger – and the Trump administration's threat to squash it – had been a rumored motivation for CBS's decision to pay Trump millions to settle a frivolous defamation suit; it was also rumored to have caused an outcry at the CBS news magazine program 60 Minutes and the end of the evening talkshow The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, when writers, journalists, and performers on those shows stood by their critical coverage of the president or mocked the deal their bosses paid him. The shakedown, after all, is a tactic that lots of institutions are vulnerable to, and Trump is already using it effectively to stifle some of the most visible forms of dissent. The institutions are not standing firm against him; they are capitulating. They are choosing their short-term interest over their long-term integrity. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
The Guardian
13 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Macrons' Candace Owens lawsuit marks new phase in battle against conspiracy theories
When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte, took the rare step this week of filing a US defamation lawsuit against the rightwing podcaster Candace Owens, it marked a new phase in a legal battle on both sides of the Atlantic against the false claim that Brigitte Macron is a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux. The Macrons' US lawsuit attacked what it called the 'verifiably false and devastating lies' being repeated online by Owens that Brigitte Macron, 72, was born a man. The lawsuit said evidence clearly disproved this 'grotesque narrative', which had become 'a campaign of global humiliation' and 'relentless bullying on a worldwide scale'. The case prompted broader questions this week about how conspiracy theories spread worldwide, whether they can be stopped in the courts and what this false narrative, which began in France after the Covid pandemic, says about French society's distrust in politicians. 'This is now one of the biggest fake news stories worldwide in terms of popularity – a billion people have seen it,' said Emmanuelle Anizon, a senior journalist for the French weekly Nouvel Obs, who last year published a book, L'Affaire Madame, investigating the origins of the rumour in France. 'What's new is that for the first time, Emmanuel Macron has joined his wife in taking legal action.' The Macrons' US lawsuit states the accusation that Brigitte Macron was born a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux is completely false and Trogneux is in fact is her older brother. Trogneux, 80, lives in the northern French town of Amiens, where he grew up with Brigitte and four other siblings in a family famous for its local chocolate business. He was present in public alongside his Brigitte at Emmanuel Macron's two presidential inaugurations in 2017 and 2022. Owens, whose podcast and social media channels have an audience of millions, said this week she stood by her narrative. The false claim that Brigitte was a man first went viral in France in 2021, at a moment when distrust of politicians in was at a high, after the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) anti-government protest movement and the Covid pandemic that killed more than 130,000 people in France. In December 2021, a woman who used the name Amandine Roy and called herself a 'spiritual medium', broadcast a four-hour YouTube interview with Natacha Rey, 51, who had worked previously for a small essential oils business and described herself as 'an independent investigative journalist, self-taught, and not from the inner circle of mainstream media'. Rey said she had spent three years investigating Brigitte Macron, after questioning the first lady's body-shape in photos. Rey said she believed Brigitte Macron was actually a man called Jean-Michel Trogneux. Within hours, the interview had 500,000 views and the hashtag #Jean-MichelTrogneux was trending on social media in France, promoted by, among others, some far-right and anti-vaccine accounts. A small far-right newsletter had already published Rey's theories but it was the video interview that sent the claim viral. 'There was a deeper societal problem at that time in France: the mistrust of political, media and economic institutions,' Anizon said. 'There had been years of political health scandals worldwide and in France – from a contaminated blood scandal to the Mediator weight-loss drug. Many people had gradually reached a point of distrust, switching off traditional mainstream media and turning instead to online accounts – Covid and vaccine mistrust increased that.' The rumour spread in part because the Macrons' relationship had long been a topic of comment online. Brigitte Macron, who is 24 years older, first met Emmanuel Macron when she was a French teacher at his Jesuit secondary school in Amiens, directing him in a school play. The Macrons' US lawsuit this week stated: 'Through the school's theatre programme, president Macron and Mrs Macron formed a deeper intellectual connection.' It added: 'At all times the teacher-student relationship between Mrs Macron and President Macron remained within the bounds of the law.' Brigitte Macron, who has three children from her first marriage, divorced in 2006 and she and Emmanuel Macron married the following year when he was 30. In early 2022, after the first viral video allegations, Brigitte Macron and her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, filed a defamation case in France against Roy and Rey, who both denied wrongdoing. In September 2024, a Paris court found the two women guilty and ordered them to pay €8,000 in damages to Brigitte Macron and €5,000 in damages to Jean-Michel Trogneux. The women appealed against the verdict and, this month, they were acquitted by a Paris appeals court. The appeal court verdict did not imply that the claims that Brigitte Macron was a man were true, but instead judges ruled that the case against the women did not fit the definition of defamation. Brigitte Macron and Jean-Michel Trogneux have taken the case to France's highest appeals court, the cour de cassation. Brigitte Macron has filed a separate case for online harassment and 10 people will go on trial in Paris in October. Each time the Macrons' relationship is in the spotlight, the false allegations about gender spread again online. This was the case in May, when video images appeared to show Brigitte pushing her husband away with both hands on his face before they disembarked from a plane on a tour of Southeast Asia. Macron dismissed the incident as play-fighting, telling reporters that 'we are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife', and that it had been overblown into 'a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe'. Brigitte Macron has not spoken publicly on the false gender claims since 2022 when she told French radio, RTL, that allegations that 'I am my brother' were an 'impossible' attack on her parents' family tree. She told TF1 TV at the time she wanted to set an example so other people would not suffer in the same way. She said fighting online bullying 'is my battle'.
Daily Mail
13 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Cam shows jaw-dropping moment on-duty cop kisses elementary teacher in her classroom
A police officer has been stripped of his badge after kissing an elementary school teacher and engaging in sexual activity in her classroom. Brian Gilley was barred from ever returning to law enforcement in Tennessee after Lebanon Police Department concluded an internal investigation into his relationship with teacher Shelby Moss on school property at Castle Heights Elementary School. Extraordinary bodycam captured part of the tryst, including the moment a student walked into the room about two minutes before the pair locked lips. Gilley had previously worked on the D.A.R.E. program educating students on drug prevention, WZTV reported. The incident in question took place last September. Gilley later accepted that students may have still been on campus at the time. The footage was not linked to the September incident, which ultimately led to Gilley's resignation. While he initially denied the sexual conduct, he ultimately admitted it and resigned shortly after. Teacher Moss was reportedly in a relationship at the time of the affair with Gilley, according to an investigative report.
