Immediately following the certification of Biden as president-elect by a joint session of both houses of Congress in the early hours of January 7, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) submitted an assessment of foreign interference in the U.S. 2020 election to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee The 14-page report is classified. The 14-page report is classified, but Washington Watch obtained it and reported on its website on July 7 under the headline “Intelligence Analysts Underestimate China’s Influence on Election,” reporting on the U.S. intelligence community’s concerns about Chinese interference in the U.S. election and revealing divisions within the intelligence community.
It is unknown what details of Chinese interference in the U.S. election are contained in the report, but according to Washington Watch, the report does not address vote-by-mail fraud or questions about voting machine manipulation. John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, attached a confidential letter to the report. In the letter, which was quoted by Washington Watch, Ratcliffe said, “It is clear to me that analysts from various intelligence agencies focused on election threats in different counties used different terms to describe the same nefarious actions” and that “they assessed similar actions by Russia and China, while presented to policymakers with different conclusions about their assessments, potentially leading policymakers to mistakenly believe that Russia was trying to influence this election but China was not.”
The so-called U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) now includes a total of 18 government and military intelligence agencies. The largest is the Central Intelligence Agency; the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Office of National Security Intelligence became the 17th unit in the intelligence system in 2006; and the U.S. Space Force just joined this intelligence system on Jan. 8 of this year, according to Fox News. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is responsible for integrating the work of these intelligence units.
Analysis of the impact of differences in the background of intelligence personnel
The Washington Examiner report mentions that within the U.S. intelligence community, when analyzing threats from foreign enemies, people from different backgrounds have different tendencies, with some emphasizing the Russian threat and others underestimating the Chinese Communist threat. In an interview with Washington Watch last December, Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe said, “Some of our intelligence analysts have been in the department since the (U.S.-Soviet) Cold War era and are used to seeing Russia as a threat; those who have joined the intelligence community in the last 20 years look more at counterterrorism intelligence; but the biggest threat we face is the Chinese Communist Party, and we need to focus more on the Chinese Communist on the threat.”
Intelligence analysts, whose personal value in the workplace is linked to their foreign language skills and foreign experience, tend to emphasize threats to the United States from countries with which they are familiar. This is a bit like the tendency of some liberal arts professors in universities to offer easy-to-learn, useless courses to recruit students in order to keep their jobs. But this tendency is not the only reason why the report underestimates the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on the U.S. election; another reason is that some intelligence analysts base their intelligence analysis on their personal party preferences.
From the Washington Examiner’s report, it appears that the report was due to the Senate Intelligence Committee last month, and perhaps to the White House at that time, but was delayed because of a dispute among top intelligence officials over the role of the Chinese Communist Party. Barry Zulauf, a senior intelligence official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who authored the report, told Washington Watch that Chinese intelligence analysts seemed reluctant to assess China’s actions (in response to the U.S. election) as undue influence or interference; they tended to disagree with U.S. (Trump) administration policy and therefore did not want to release their analysis. out.
Zulauf also revealed that Ratcliffe “did not agree with the established direction of [Chinese intelligence analysts’] analysis of the CCP’s actions. Ratcliffe insisted that “the actions of the Chinese Communist Party were indeed intended to influence the presidential election,” Zulauf said, citing Ratcliffe.
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