Trump DOJ ally believed China used 'special thermometers' to alter vote machine tallies: CNN

A Department of Justice ally of former President Donald Trump pushed an utterly bizarre theory about the Chinese government using thermometers to switch votes to President Joe Biden.

CNN reports that Jeffrey Clark, the Trump-appointed environment law chief who tried to get the DOJ to directly interfere in Georgia's certification of the 2020 results, peddled a truly strange conspiracy theory about election fraud to his colleagues.

"Clark told senior Justice officials that he knew of sensitive information that indicated Chinese intelligence used special kinds of thermometers to change results in machines tallying votes," CNN's sources claim. "The Justice Department by then had made clear it found no evidence of vote-changing in the election."

CNN's sources say that then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, a staunch Trump loyalist, even provided Clark with a classified briefing outlining why China did not use magic thermometers to steal the election, but Clark was apparently not persuaded.

"During the briefing, Clark expressed skepticism not of Ratcliffe's personal motives, but the analysis from the intelligence community that he was presenting," CNN writes. "Clark believed some intelligence officials were withholding certain information from Ratcliffe because they were concerned about it being politicized by the Trump administration or certain policymakers."