NSA Blocked Reports of CCP Interference in US Elections From Reaching Trump: Declassified Docshttps://www.theepochtimes.com/us/nsa-blocked-reports-of-ccp-interference-in-us-elections-from-reaching-trump-declassified-docs-6076308?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=BonginoReport&src_src=partner&src_cmp=BonginoReportWASHINGTON—Newly declassified intelligence emails reveal that decisions were made by National Security Agency (NSA) leadership to block reports of Chinese influence in American elections from reaching President Donald Trump.
Four pages of emails, all dated March 13, 2020, were released on Aug. 18 by the White House Government Transparency Task Force.
According to one email—written by an unidentified NSA employee following a meeting about intelligence reporting foreign efforts to target the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in the United States beginning in 2014—internal concerns were raised about the agency’s suppression of the reports.
“We did not know why we were here, trying to defend the election and identify threats to it, if we were unable to actually report what those threats were because of issues like this,” the NSA employee wrote.
According to another email, NSA analysts had proposed releasing the reports in 2018.
Task force officials are digging through files to determine why evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to influence the elections was not passed on to the president, Congress, and some intelligence leaders, including then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, now CIA director.
Certain aspects of the reports on the Chinese election influence were censored because “it was judged that some of the details regarding the 2016 election were ‘sensational’ and so required a limited distribution [redacted],” an NSA analyst wrote, noting that colleagues tried for 16 months to get the information published.
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Intelligence officers were told in February 2020 that the office approved the report, and analysts prioritized its delivery, but the NSA deputy director blocked its release, according to the documents.
George Barnes served as NSA deputy director from 2017 to 2023.
Summarizing a bit, the NSA began investigating foreign attempts to influence US elections in 2014. Some time between 2014 and 2018, the NSA found evidence that China was trying to influence the 2016 Presidential election, but kept it secret through 2020, with the Deputy Director, in early 2020, directly blocking its release.
IOW, the agency that participated in the failed attempt to transmogrify ordinary Russian attempts to create confusion in the 2016 election into the
Trump-Russia Collusion Delusion, concealed from Trump, for four years, equal or greater "interference" in the 2016 election by China. The article does not go into what the 2016 "interference" was, whether "just" disguised Chinese trolls stirring @#$% on FB and other social media or something more substantial.
That the Deputy Director, in 2020 blocked release of the info could have been to prevent scrutiny, but keeping it secret for four years was partisan, Anti-Trump action.
