Assessments

A supposedly suppressed National Intellegence document

Wuhan wet market (not, I think, the one where the coronavirus emerged). Photo by Arend Kuester via UCLA Newsroom.

I was interested in finding something precise about the “new evidence” the Trumpers claimed to have discovered implicating the Chinese government in interfering with the 2020 US national elections and trying to evaluate it myself, really just for something I could get an analytic handle on, but considerably more interested when I learned from a Reuters report that the Trumpers’ point man on the project was our old pal John Solomon, the “investigative” journalist who had been fired by the conservative The Hill over his coverage of the Uranium One controversy of 2017, where he was a key figure in the rightwing effort to implicate Hillary Clinton in a fictitious bribery scandal; Rudolph Giuliani’s collaborator in the effort to create a Ukrainian bribery scandal implicating Hunter Biden and possibly President Joe Biden, over which Trump was impeached in 2019; and Kash Patel’s partner in the management of the stolen government documents at Mar-a-Lago for which Trump was indicted in federal court in 2023. So I naturally smelled some dirt.

The thing itself wasn’t all that new: it was that when the National Intelligence Community issued its report on foreign interference in the 2020 election, in March 2021, one of the authors, National Intelligence Officer for Cyber Christopher Porter, was not in total agreement with its finding on China:

Key Judgment 4: We assess 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. We have high confidence in this judgment. China sought stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools— primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying—would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping US China policy regardless of the winner. The NIO for Cyber assesses, however, that China did take some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s reelection. (My bold)

But Porter’s specific reasons for objecting did not make it into the declassified version. Now his explanation (co-signed by a nameless Director for Election Threat Analysis) is available too in PDF format, if in a heavily redacted form, among the documents released in Trump’s latest effort to show that there might have been a bit of foreign interference against Trump (in addition to the well-known interference in Trump’s behalf on the part of the Israeli and Russian governments):

Not much, as you see at the outset: only some low-level, exploratory steps, probably overt and probably not aggressive, and low-to-medium confidence as to whether it happened at all, in contrast to the high confidence of the majority.

For example?

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Something something something suggested that at least something. Such as

It’s suggested by someone who must remain nameless that somebody may have recommended something, but we aren’t allowed to reveal much about what it was, and

somebody still more secret has claimed that the Chinese government could have done something pretty bad, but we’re even more not allowed to talk about that. (I’m starting to wonder if some of the reactions are hiding not “sources and methods” but hedges downplaying the seriousness of the thing even more than the text itself.)

But when you think about it practically anything the Chinese say, in their communications with the press, with individuals, or in social media, if they’re criticizing US policy could be aimed at influencing the presidential election in a way that might fool Trump into thinking they’re just being their usual cantankerous selves, so he won’t be problematically angry with them if he gets reeelected:

And, as footnote d reminds us, the Intelligence Community as a whole has noted that whatever they are overtly doing to influence the election could just as easily be something they’d be doing anyway to influence policy; and between that and the fact that there’s no evidence at all that the “nascent online covert capabilities” Porter suspects have been put into action, there’s no discernible difference between a world in which China is interfering with the 2020 election campaign and one in which it isn’t:

How could you possibly tell?

There was one overwhelmingly significant issue in US-Chinese relations during the 2020 election campaign, that of the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 and traveled to much of the rest of the world, including the US, by the following March, directly impacting Trump’s reelection run as his approval ratings shot up to nearly 50% in a patriotic rally effect and then collapsed to 38% as the hospitalization and death rates surged, remaining in the very low 40s for the rest of the year.

Trump had begun with compliments for President Xi Jinping on his handling of the disease, and praise of China’s “transparency” but then as he began to fear the politics of the moment turned to blame, referring to the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus” or “Kung flu” and encouraging the theory that the virus had come not from the traditional wet market where the first known victim of the disease worked as a seafood vendor, but the Wuhan Institute of Virology seven or ten miles away, from a bat specimen they might have collected or, in a more sinister hypothesis, from the scientists’ own experimental research.

Which I assume he was doing out of the obvious motives, to deflect public attention from the early failures of his own administration, starting with the disbanding of the National Security Council global health security and biodefense directorate, the difficulty in starting a testing regime and getting supplies of PPE, the rejection of the public health face-mask recommendations, and the rushed economic reopening in May, but which had real-world consequences of its own, especially in concert with the usual xenophobe media like Fox News, an alarming rise in anti-Asian sentiment and anti-Asian violence. And that was a matter of interest to the Chinese government, which sees itself as a kind of protector of the “Overseas Chinese” communities around the world.

The Porter report mentions COVID in only one slightly mysterious spot:

I wonder what that was. I literally find one online reference to a Chinese newspaper editorial of May 2020 (quoted in an English-language Hong Kong newspaper opinion piece) on the US lawsuits and all they said was that the litigation was “a political strategy to divert public anger away from the Trump administration’s ineptitude in handling the pandemic” which sounds like something I could have written myself. (I guess I could check endnote 46 if the declassifiers had included the endnotes in their version, but they didn’t, which kind of shows how seriously they took the job.) I’m pretty sure the Chinese government did not take economic measures to punish the Republicans who sued them. Only one of the suits seems to have had any effect, that of the state of Missouri, for engaging in “misrepresentations, concealment, and retaliation to conceal the gravity and seriousness of the COVID-19 outbreak from the rest of the world”, to which a federal judge awarded a judgment of $24 billion in March 2025 after China failed to defend itself. There’s not a chance they’ll be able to collect.

There’s lots more to look at, but I thought it might be helpful to have a detailed look at one of the key documents, and its total nullity (in the speech Trump delivered, there don’t even seem to be any references to it), right off the bat.