The Trump dump

Or, what do the China records say?

The US President, as proclaimed in his July 16 address, has openly gone to war with his own intelligence community. It’s a war declared in the run-up to the US Congressional mid-term elections in November. The war is centred on his claims about a ‘deep state’ deliberately suppressing intelligence on interference in the 2020 Presidential election, which he lost but did his damnedest to over-turn and refuses to accept.

All wars are nasty. Trump’s conduct in this one is particularly so, and lacks all higher purpose beyond his own political survival. Honesty, truth-telling, are nowhere to be found.

The key documents are those contained in a tranche released by the White House on the evening of July 16, 2026, concerning China’s intelligence gathering on the US presidential election of 2020. The tranche is titled “China’s Acquisition and Exploitation of American voter data.” ^[1]

There are 23 documents in total from U.S. intelligence agencies, mostly identified as “Sensitive Government Agency.” The documents range in size from 1 page to 35. There is a lot of “black”—redactions to the documents, which vastly complicates making full sense of many of them. But enough sense emerges.

Three conclusions, straight out:

1. This is not a coherent record. It’s a highly-selective political comb-through, trying to find some semblance of dirt (and failing to do so)

2. There is no smoking gun here indicating that Chinese intelligence activities had any impact on the 2020 Presidential election. There is considerable reporting to suggest that China had, in fact, decided against trying to influence the election outcome.

3. There is zero evidence of the “deep state” at work, conspiring to hide secrets. Instead, there is evidence of a professional intelligence community doing its best to make sense of the information available to them and come up with consensus judgements about what it meant. On occasion, they clearly could not reach consensus, but battled it out, which is what you would hope and expect.

And what might the impact be of this politicised data dump? It can’t help but further undermine the effectiveness and morale of the US intelligence community, watching a President cherry-pick records, engage in partial releases, and try to spin a bullshit tale about the deep state.

It should be another discouraging sign for any allied intelligence community, Canada’s included, trying to maintain any semblance of business as usual with its US counterparts.

-------------- [here lies the tear line]---------------

Now I am hoping that some of you might be willing to follow me, Pied Piper-like, deeper into the records themselves. (I promise you will return, unscathed, but maybe a little heavy of heart).

My analysis of the most significant documents included in the Trump dump follows.

I’ll begin with a CIA memo from July 1, 2020. This was a two-pager, entitled “China: Cyber Activities Probably Prelude to Election Espionage. [The document is identified in the release as CIA Wire Memo Summer 2020 Declass]. It described an effort by China to “probe the presidential campaign for opportunities to tailor collection and gather insight on policy positions on US-Chinese issues.” The probing particularly fell on the former Vice-President [Joe Biden]. The CIA report states that “as the 2020 election approaches, the IC [Intelligence Community] has detected Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors targeting the former Vice President’s presidential campaign, probably to gather intelligence that could enable future operations, the first instance this election cycle that we have seen them directly targeting a US presidential campaign.”

This early intelligence report leads to a more extensive and heated debate within the US intelligence community about what they were seeing, how to assess it, and how to communicate its findings.

The National Intelligence Council (NIC), the senior-most analytic body, produced an assessment on August 19, 2020, titled “Foreign Threats to 2020 US Federal Election.” [“NICA Foreign Threats…TED”] It focused on potential influence activity by three states: Russia, China and Iran. According to the NIC, Russian activity was directed at denigrating Biden, while “some Kremlin actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media.” China’s influence activities were believed to far out-strip that of any other foreign state. The NIC reported that China, “prefers that President Trump be defeated” and was stepping up its public rhetoric. The assessment also reads “ [redacted]Beijing did not intend to try to affect the election…” It amplified this judgement by stating “We assess Beijing probably calculates that a concerted effort to [redacted] influence the Presidential election would [redacted] backfiring and offer uncertain benefit, but [redacted] also recognizes [redacted] critical statements might affect the race.”

As for Iran, the NIC found that it was “conducting an influence campaign to undermine the current President Trump and US democratic institutions, and to divide the country in advance of the 2020 elections.” Some other foreign leaders were mentioned, with the wry note that German Chancellor Angela Merkel would prefer that Trump not win (they didn’t get along) and that the Saudi Crown Prince, Muhammad Bin Salman would prefer that he did…” the President was the most Saudi-friendly of any US President.”

In late August-early September 2020, there was a fascinating email chain as different elements of the U.S. intelligence community sparred over how to report on Chinese election interference. [“EMAIL_RE please coord by COB 9.1-4”] The NIC, CIA, FBI and NSA were all involved in this debate as they tried to come up with consensus language. Again, there is much black ink, so no one should imagine we are getting the complete picture of this debate. Trump and his team would clearly like to read into it deep state machinations. They are just not there. What is there is debate, which is what you would hope for in an important intelligence assessment. It even got a bit pissy, with the NIC Director of Election Threat Analysis saying, “if we can’t communicate our thinking clearly, maybe we should just quit and go home…”

The key statements are these:

“community consensus seems to be—[PRC] activities are focused on policy preferences and that election related activity is not worth the risk.” [author, FBI Unit Chief, Foreign Influence Task Force—China]

And this from the State Department’s intelligence bureau (INR):

“In this case, we actually do possess positive evidence about China’s intent—and it suggests China probably is not intending to interfere in the election.”

The outlier appears to have been the NIC “election threat team.” The NIC team appear to have been interested in including a statement that “unidentified pro-China influence actors[redacted] have been spreading English-language videos on US social media platforms that criticize the President’s policies, promote socially divisive themes and denigrate him…” They were urged to produce a “standalone dissent to the majority view,” probably because the unidentifiedinfluence actors could not be directly linked to the PRC.

A dissenting report appears to have been produced by the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Cyber, typically a NSA official, and by the Director of Election Threat Analysis at the NIC. An email memo from early October 2020 [“EMAIL-RE for IC coord by Oct 7 2020”] states:

“NIO Cyber and I have a somewhat different take on the China/election story than what has appeared in production so far. Rather than continue to argue about this and drive you all nuts we are opting to publish an alternative analysis NIC memo.”

Sounds dramatic? Not really. Read on:

“The lead, in short non-compartmented [referring to higher levels of security classification] is that we assess Beijing has taken some low-level exploratory steps to denigrate the President [Trump] and shape voter perceptions ahead of the election.”

What we don’t have in the collection is the actual NIC alternative assessment, or the one it dissents from. All we have are more email chains reflecting on what might or might not appear in a future PDB (Presidential Daily Brief) on Chinese election interference. In one, from October 6, 2020, the NIC Director of the Election Threat Analysis team notes:

“I’ve burned enough political capital arguing with CIA and FBI about this…The positions are not really that far apart, so I am not sure why so many in the community want to close down the possibility that China might have done ‘something.’ But hopefully this piece sparks some more thought and discussion.” [EMAIL_RE for IC Coord by Oct 7 2020]

The dispute even reached the office of the “IC [Intelligence community] Analytic Ombudsman. It was, in other words, not brushed off or buried. [EMAIL_NSA.Massaged PDB_20 Nov 2020]

The documentary trail runs dead after a lone December 23, 2021 memo from the NIO Cyber disputing the IC “call.” Presumably this one is included by Trump minions because it uses the language of partisanship. “We should consider…on what logical, non-partisan basis the IC calls one way or the other. Why is this unit [the reference appears to be to a Chinese military hacking group] engaged in election influence in the [redacted] and [redacted] to ‘promote Chinese interests’ but when they do it here it’s ‘issue influence’ not election-related?” [EMAIL_Everyone’s favourite topic 23 DE]

There are a few more documentary leavings in the collection concerning this internal assessment debate. There are three one-pagers, undated, marked “Summary,” which refer to Chinese “extensive” plans ahead of the 2020 Presidential election to utilize “potential [redacted] and cyber operations to sway public opinion against the Trump administration and international opinion against the U.S. Government.” [“Summary-clean-declass Marked Part 1-3”]

There is no indication of where or how these summaries appeared in intelligence reporting or whether these “extensive plans” by China were ever put into action. This is clearly a case of cherry-picking for effect.

There is other miscellany in the document dump. This includes some records, very heavily redacted, about PRC acquisition of voter registration information, some at least from publicly available websites. One document from 2022, notes that “Voter registration information from at least 2013 through 2021 is publicly available for download from the commercial web sites and it appears the PRC CNE [“computer network exploitation] actor downloaded the full repositories.” It goes on to say the personal information obtained “could, in theory, be leveraged to carry out anything from future CNE operations to election influence operations, although the actual motivations for collecting this information is unknown.” [“US Voter Registration for 6 states-clean”] There is a summary of the PRC hoovering of US data that goes back to the mid-2010s and includes voter data, other personal identity information, compromised websites, social networking websites, NGOS, religious groups and professional organizations, other private entities, and government entities. In the last category is listed F-15 (figher jet) related data going back as far as 1998. [“200M Voter records compromised”]

This and other documents on mass data exfiltration by the PRC are silent on any assessment of what China could or did do with the information. One CIA “Note” on “Sensitive PRC reporting from 2018-2020,” described as “not a comprehensive synopsis or summary of all the reporting disseminated during that time period,” simply concluded that “The Chinese Government wanted the U.S. President to lose the next election [redacted].” [“Note—Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018-2020”]

I have left the largest single document in the Trump dump till last, because it is also the least consequential. This is a 35-page document detailing message handling about a FBI Albany field report in the Fall of 2020 [Tasking_3_AlbanyBriefingHandout]. It’s difficult on the eyes and brain and clearly was also a pain for FBI analysts. One skype conversation is recorded as saying “another fucking IIR [Information Report] went out on election security,” which elicited the response, “oh crap,” and a query about sourcing.

Fortunately, there is a two-pager from the FBI that casts light [“FBI_Albany_IIR_Provided To_Chairman GRASSLEY”].The report involved an alleged PRC export of fraudulent US drivers’ licences to Chinese sympathizers in the U.S. “in order to create tens of thousands of fraudulent mail-in votes for US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden, in late August 2020.” We learn the report was based on a single source “with indirect access,” “none of whose reporting has been corroborated for less than one year.” The FBI over-view also noted that “the source obtained the information from an identified sub-source, who claimed they obtained the information from unidentified PRC government officials.” A comment noted that TikTok accounts from which the alleged drivers’ licence details were supposedly extracted do not contain a person’s address information. Ooops.

This was the worst sort of raw intelligence and internal doubts were raised that it complied with the system used by the FBI for evaluating and circulating raw reporting, called, in an unfortunate acronym, DRAIN. DRAIN stood for:

· Detailed

· Respectful of the rights of USPERS (US persons)

· Authoritative

· Of interest

· New

Trump the plumber, has sucked this piece of effluent back up the pipe.

If there is any consoling element to the sordid story of the Trump data dump and the President’s attacks on his own intelligence community, a.k.a. deep state, it is how ineffective and bumbling they are.

A conspiracy theorist who can’t mount a decent conspiracy.

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^[1] The White House, July 16, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/election-integrity/