These extraordinary claims lay at the heart of a feverish effort by Trump’s allies to overturn the 2020 election, and addressing such findings would have fallen directly under the responsibility of Ratcliffe, who was then serving as director of national intelligence.
Under Presidential Executive Order 13848, which was issued by Trump in 2018, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is required “to provide an assessment on foreign election influence and interference within 45 days of federal elections.” The deadline for the assessment of the 2020 election was set for Dec. 18, 2020, but an agency spokesperson announced two days in advance that Ratcliffe had been “notified by career intelligence officials” that the intelligence community would not meet the deadline because intelligence agencies had “not finished coordinating on the product.”
The CIA declined to comment in response to questions from Raw Story about why Ratcliffe was unable to meet the deadline for the assessment on foreign election interference, what if anything he may have known about the matter, whether he reported any information directly to Trump, or whether Trump sought his opinion at the time.
While Ratcliffe remained an obscure player in the tumultuous saga unfolding at the White House in the weeks leading up to Congress’ Jan. 6, 2021 certification of the election, a trio of outside allies led by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, made a surprise visit to the White House on Dec. 18. The delegation, which also included lawyer Sidney Powell and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, was specifically focused on the provisions of Executive Order 13848, and the assessment on foreign election interference on which the agency that was led by Ratcliffe was conspicuously silent.
The three visitors presented Trump with a draft memo that called on the government to seize voting machines in states narrowly won by President-elect Joe Biden.
“I drafted the foreign interference findings if I remember correctly, or at least had a hand in writing those, to support the use of Executive Order 13848 on cyber security to secure the voting machines hopefully in three to five cities where the voting irregularities were the worst,” Powell said in her deposition before the now-defunct House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The meeting devolved into shouting, with Trump’s White House lawyers pushing back on the plan proposed by Powell, Flynn and Byrne. Ultimately, Trump did not carry out the proposed plan to seize voting machines. Instead, he sent out a tweet in the early morning hours of Dec. 19 calling on his supporters to assemble at the Ellipse on the day Congress was set to meet to certify the election.
“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump wrote. “Be there, will be wild!”
The assessment on foreign interference eventually came out on March 15, 2021, and it did not confirm what Trump’s allies hoped — or what the president is expected to say tonight.
Instead, the assessment said: “We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election.”
The report went on to say that intelligence analysts assessed that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.” The report included a “minority view” reflecting that a national intelligence officer for cyber concluded that China “took at least some steps to undermine President Trump’s reelection chances,” primarily through social media and official public statements.
Ratcliffe did weigh in on the question of Chinese meddling in the 2020 election, but not until Jan. 7, 2021. Ratcliffe issued a memo one day after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, and then Congress reconvened in the evening to certify Biden as the winner of the election. By then, it was too late to lend credence to Trump’s outlandish claims that the election was stolen, or change the outcome.
Ratcliffe raised questions in his memo entitled “Views on Intelligence Community Election Security Analysis,” by citing a report by the Intelligence Community’s Analytic Ombudsman. The ombudsman report found that “China analysts were hesitant to assess China’s actions as undue influence or interference. These analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the administration’s policies, saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies.”
Notably, Ratcliffe’s memo did not express disagreement with the assessment’s core finding that China did not interfere in the election. Ratcliffe only differed with the consensus view in his assessment that China sought to influence the 2020 election while others concluded that China had no preference between Trump and Biden.
After Trump won the 2024 election, he appointed Ratcliffe to serve as CIA director.
The claims that Trump is expected to make tonight about Chinese meddling in the 2020 election have been at the heart of election deniers’ arguments all along. Two weeks after the election, Powell claimed during a press conference with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that she and others had uncovered “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China and the interference with our elections here in the United States,” while describing an “algorithm” that purportedly switched votes from Trump to Biden.
Fox News eventually agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems almost $800 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over airing claims made by Powell and Giuliani during appearances on the network that the voting machines switched votes.
Trump’s allies continued to push the claim that China interfered in the election through manipulation of the voting machines after the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting at the White House. Denver Riggleman, who served as the senior technical advisor for the Jan. 6 Committee, has described EO 13848, which was supposed to have triggered an assessment on foreign interference, as the “operational planning document” for the effort to overturn the election.
Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel whom Riggleman identified as the source of the theory promoted by Powell and Giuliani, submitted a document to Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff called “National Asset tasking request to support EO 13848,” according to Riggleman.
A PowerPoint circulated by Waldron before Jan. 6, 2021 called “Options for 6 JAN” featured the claim about Chinese interference front and center in its “talking points.”
“The Chinese systematically gained control over our election system constituting a national security emergency,” the document reads. “The electronic voting machines were compromised and cannot be trusted to provide an accurate count.”
In contrast, the memo issued by Ratcliffe around the same time only went so far as to claim that China sought to influence the outcome of the election. Ratcliffe qualified his assessment by accurately describing himself in his role as director of national intelligence “as the individual who consumes all of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence on the People’s Republic of China.”
Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight, a Georgia-based nonprofit advocating for free and fair elections, said the American people “can expect a truckload of lies” from Trump,” adding that it’s critical for the news media to avoid legitimizing them by repeating them without independent verification.
“Trump has thrown everything at the wall to influence the next election — two executive orders blocked in court, the SAVE Act rejected repeatedly even by a Republican-controlled Congress, calls on GOP states to rig their maps — and none of it has given his party a safe enough cushion against the will of the people,” Groh-Wargo said.
“Now he is desperate, and he is about to use lies as the pretext for an extraordinary abuse of power to try and change how Americans vote. He’s scared of the American people having the freedom to use their power to hold him accountable — we will make our choice at the ballot box, and he will fail.”
