Director Patel says the documents detail ‘alarming allegations’ that ‘while substantiated, were abruptly recalled and never disclosed to the public.’
WASHINGTON—The FBI has stepped up scrutiny over how it handled previously undisclosed documents containing source claims over alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 elections.
The documents, which the agency’s director declassified on June 16 and shared with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), were dated months before the 2020 presidential election. They show the FBI alerting federal agencies to fraudulent U.S. driver’s licenses from China being shipped to the United States—then recalling the advisory and asking for the file’s destruction, according to files The Epoch Times has obtained.
“This report was recalled in order to re-interview the source,” reads the recall document. “Recipients should destroy all copies of the original report and remove the original report from all computer holdings. Recipients should also ensure that any citation of the information in finished intelligence products draws on the SUBSTANTIVE RECALL of this report rather than the previous version.”
The advisory in question was dated Aug. 24, 2020, weeks after U.S. authorities announced the seizure of nearly 20,000 counterfeit driver’s licenses that mostly came from China for college-age students. The Customs and Border Protection said at the time that the fake identity documents could lead to identity theft and endanger critical U.S. infrastructure.
The FBI document cited a sub-source who claimed to have obtained information from unidentified Chinese officials.
The uncorroborated claim states that the Chinese regime produced a large number of fake driver’s licenses and “secretly exported” them to the United States, which would allow for “tens of thousands” of otherwise ineligible Chinese students and immigrants to cast fraudulent votes. It added that the regime had used private user data captured from TikTok accounts to produce the licenses and would use them for mail-in ballot votes.
The FBI added a caveat to the claim, noting in a comment that a person’s address information “was not a valid field when creating a TikTok account.”
“It was unspecified how China would attain US address data from the application,” the comment states. It noted that the source is “available for re-contact.”
FBI Director Kash Patel produced the documents at the request of Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Grassley, who in May asked for an intelligence information report from the FBI’s Albany field office from Sept. 25, 2020.
“Thanks to the oversight work and partnership of Chairman Grassley, the FBI continues to provide unprecedented transparency at the people’s bureau,” Patel told The Epoch Times.
He described the allegations outlined in the document as “alarming.”
“Specifically, these include allegations of plans from the CCP to manufacture fake driver’s licenses and ship them into the United States for the purpose of facilitating fraudulent mail in ballots—allegations which, while substantiated, were abruptly recalled and never disclosed to the public,” he said, using the acronym for the Chinese Communist Party.
By Eva Fu
