Declassified Doc Confirms China Did, in Fact, Breach US Election Security Leading up to 2020 Election

With Republicans working to pass the SAVE America Act in the Senate to safeguard election integrity, a new report out of Washington is highlighting a potential danger to American elections that Democrats don’t want to talk about.

And it turns out there’s a good reason for that — since it could cast a shadow over Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 vote that has never quite set right with the American right.

It’s a danger that comes from the People’s Republic of China — the United States’ most dangerous enemy on the global stage.

According to a document obtained by Just the News, and confirmed with officials who had knowledge of the investigation, Beijing was able to electronically infiltrate unidentified American election systems as part of a cyber-espionage campaign.

“[Redacted] Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple U.S. states’ [Redacted] election voter registration data, [Redacted] to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election,” a portion of an April 2020 National Intelligence Council document stated.

The memo, titled “Cyber Operations Enabling Expansive Authoritarianism,” was “quietly declassified” in 2022, but received no attention from either President Joe Biden’s administration or from the establishment media.

“That means six years later that the U.S. intelligence community has yet to fully inform the American people or the Congress on the breadth of evidence it possesses of China’s actions, how Beijing got the data, and what operations it has taken or contemplated,” wrote Just the News founder John Solomon and chief investigative correspondent Jerry Dunleavy.

The information in question relates to voter registration — not actual voting systems. But that doesn’t make it unimportant.

“Voter registration data is not the same as ballots, where Americans choose their candidates,” Solomon and Dunleavy wrote. “But it contains sensitive personally identifying information, including driver’s license data and partial Social Security numbers. The data is considered so sensitive that several Democrat states are currently trying to keep the Trump Justice Department from obtaining it and liberal groups claim it is a holy grail of election integrity.”

And who was the only intel official sounding serious warnings about Chinese activities? Trump’s director of national intelligence in 2020, John Ratcliffe.

Just a reminder, too, that President Joe Biden’s administration made a big to-do about this sort of thing happening in the United Kingdom. From The Wall Street Journal, April of 2024:

The Biden administration hit alleged Chinese hackers with sanctions and criminal charges on Monday while the British government accused Beijing of hacking the U.K.’s electoral register to steal the personal details of tens of millions of voters, part of a global push by allies to condemn China’s expanding aggression in cyberspace. …

The alleged hackers, alongside five other defendants, were also indicted on criminal charges unsealed by the U.S. Justice Department, and the U.S. State Department offered a $10 million reward for information about the group.

“The United States will continue its work to disrupt the dangerous and irresponsible actions of cyber actors targeting critical infrastructure,” said Brian Nelson, a senior Treasury Department official. “Through continued close coordination with our U.K. partners, and a unified, whole of government approach, we will protect our citizens from the catastrophic risks these reckless cyber activities pose.”

The U.K.’s Electoral Commission, which manages elections, said last year that hackers had accessed the nation’s voter-registration records—which included the names and addresses of around 40 million people—as well as the commission’s email system and information about political donors. The hackers accessed the system in 2021 but were only detected in late 2022, the commission said at the time.

Why not go public with the knowledge that the Chinese government had also tried similar shenanigans in the United States? A charitable reading might be that we wouldn’t want our adversaries to know what we know about them.

A more uncharitable reading might be 1) we were all supposed to pretend 2020 was The Safest and Most Secure Election Ever™ and 2) this would have made the alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election — never proven beyond penny-ante hijinks — look piddling by comparison.

Reading the memo, you realize this isn’t like what the Democrats alleged handed Donald Trump the election eight years ago: A handful of dodgy Moldovan fake news sites making claims like Hillary Clinton killed a man in Reno just to watch him die (or whatever).

Here we have a National Intelligence Council assessment from the heat of the 2020 election confirming that China had wide swaths of voter data and was looking to export its cyber-despotism beyond Beijing, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the like. That’s kind of a big deal.

And for four years, there were crickets from the Biden administration, all as the president was pushed around by a bellicose Xi Jinping. (Funny, he seems a bit quieter these days, especially since Operation Epic Fury. But I digress.)

Remember when Joe Biden told us he was the defender of democracy? That he was the only thing standing between America and real, live despotism? So why, then, did he not talk about this with the American people?

Damn being charitable. We know full well that the Democratic narrative was that the Russians supposedly handed Trump the 2016 election, which they didn’t. That needed to be preserved at all cost. So, too, did the idea that the United States had no worries about its election integrity.

Thus, barely a word was breathed about the Chinese getting access to voter data in 2020, which they did.

The SAVE America Act, which has passed in the House and is facing an uncertain future in the Senate, might not have prevented the Chinese operations, but it’s at least a much-needed step in the direction of shoring up American election security.

And if American election security had a higher priority, future administrations might not be so casual about covering up revelations that a foreign power is interested in hacking U.S. election systems.

And which party is trying desperately to keep the SAVE America Act from passing?

It’s yet more proof that the Democrats really are an anti-compass: You can always navigate true by going in the exact opposite direction they point to.