Senate Committee Investigates FBI Report of Chinese Influence in 2020 Election
WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee is looking into an FBI report that the Chinese government tried to influence the 2020 presidential election in favor of Joe Biden.
The report was declassified by FBI Director Kash Patel and transmitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.
It says the FBI had information that the Chinese government was issuing fake U.S. driver’s licenses that its sympathizers could use as identification to vote in the 2020 election.
The report did not confirm that votes were cast by the Chinese agents, which is part of the reason the Senate Judiciary Committee is taking up the investigation now.
A spokesperson for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the committee’s chairman, said it alleges “serious national security concerns.”
The FBI document appears to be related to a Customs and Border Protection announcement in August 2020. It said that in the first six months of 2020, the agency seized nearly 20,000 counterfeit U.S. driver’s licenses at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
The licenses were found in 1,513 shipments. Most came from China and Hong Kong.
The report given to the Senate committee this week is titled “[REDACTED] Chinese Government Production and Export of Fraudulent US Drivers Licenses to Chinese Sympathizers in the United States, in Order to Create Tens of Thousands of Fraudulent Mail-In Votes for US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden, in late August 2020.”
It comes with a disclaimer indicating further investigation would be needed to prove the allegations.
One section of it says the report “is being shared for informational purposes but has not been fully evaluated, integrated with other information, interpreted or analyzed.”
“Receiving agencies are requested not to take action based on this raw reporting without prior coordination with the FBI,” the document says.
The text of the document says that “in late August 2020, the Chinese government had produced a large amount of fraudulent United States driver’s licenses that were secretly exported to the United States.”
“The fraudulent drivers licenses would allow tens of thousands of Chinese students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party to vote for US Presidential Candidate USPER Joe ((Biden)), despite not being eligible to vote in the United States,” it says.
The document revives fears expressed in recent congressional hearings that China might use its extensive U.S. commercial connections for espionage. Much of the apprehension is directed at social media giant TikTok, whose parent company, ByteDance, has ties to the Chinese government.
“China had collected private US user data from millions of TikTok accounts, to include name, ID and address, which would allow the Chinese government to use real US persons’ information to create the fraudulent driver’s licenses,” the report from the FBI says.
“The fraudulent drivers licenses were to include true ID number and true address of US citizens, making them difficult to detect,” the document says. “China planned to use the fraudulent driver’s licenses to account for tens of thousands of mail-in votes.”
In the latest move in the dispute, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday giving TikTok another 90 days to continue operating in the United States while his administration works out a deal to turn the short form video platform over to American owners. Otherwise, it will be shut out of the U.S. market.
The FBI report claims to be based on intelligence sources inside the Chinese government. It is heavily redacted and does not name the sources.
The report appears to contradict former FBI Director Christopher Wray. He testified to Congress that he found no evidence of coordinated voter fraud before the 2020 election.
Wray resigned shortly before Trump took office in January after the president said he planned to fire him. Trump’s assertion that voter fraud made him lose the 2020 presidential election was one of the issues that divided them.
Patel explained his motivation for declassifying the report by saying the fake driver’s licenses create “alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election.”
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