The Washington Post’s China Blind Spot

Sometimes music artists change their names for marketing purposes. My former Washington Post colleague David Ignatius—@IgnatiusPost—may want to consider changing his last name to Ignoramus after his latest appearance on Morning Joe.

Ignatius claimed with a straight face that the documents President Donald Trump posted last week concerning Chinese meddling proved that it was no big deal. To make his case, he pointed to the 2020 National Intelligence Council assessments released by the president and noted, correctly, that U.S. intelligence concluded China had considered but ultimately decided against activating an election-interference operation during the 2020 election.

But what old Ignoramus ignored—yes, the alliteration is intentional—was the entire point of President Trump’s news conference.

The president showed that evidence of China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million American voter-registration files was suppressed from those assessments by career officials who boasted that they had “massaged” Trump’s briefings and established a “shadow government” to suppress intelligence.

The suppression was so profoundly disturbing that the CIA’s top election-interference official wrote to colleagues that it “boggles the mind” that the intelligence community would keep such information from a president or the American people.

Contrary to Ignoramus’ claims, the evidence Trump made public may prove for the first time that China engaged in “election interference” in 2020 and afterward. That is not my term. It is the term the National Intelligence Council says is appropriate when a foreign power targets voter-registration data, as China did in 2020.

Just in case Ignoramus missed it, I will highlight this sentence from the NIC’s October 16, 2020, report released by Trump: “Election interference is a subset of election influence targeted at the technical aspects of the election, including voter registration, casting and counting of ballots, and reporting of results.”

In other words, compromising voter-registration data is, by the intelligence community’s own definition, an act of election interference.

The NSA’s raw reports clearly state that China “compromised” and “leaked” sensitive voter data beyond what was publicly available. In 2022, the NSA became especially concerned that China had escalated its exploitation of voter data by assigning a “CNE”—a person or unit engaged in hacking and cybertheft.

Great Britain’s voter files, like America’s, are commercially available in limited form. But China obtained versions of the British files in a breach that led the Biden administration to indict Chinese hackers over the theft of 40 million British voter records. The British government called it “malicious” interference in its election.

In 2021, the Biden Justice Department indicted two Iranian hackers for accessing just 100,000 voter files from a single state, where some voter information was also commercially available. They were charged with criminally interfering in the 2020 election even though voter files are commercially available in limited form.

If China’s acquisition of 40 million files in Great Britain and Iran’s acquisition of 100,000 files in America were both treated as criminal election interference, then the acquisition of 220 million American voter files almost certainly would be considered by the intelligence community to be an act of interference. The president made no allegation in his speech that votes were flipped by machines. The intelligence supports that conclusion.

But flipped votes are not necessary for election interference. The illicit acquisition of voter files meets the textbook definition. That was the president’s point—and the point the infamous Post columnist ignored during his Morning Joe diatribe. The suppression of the voter-file breaches and other malign Chinese actions made the 2020 assessments inaccurate or misleading.

By 2021, after Trump had left office, intelligence-community officials marveled at the Biden spy agencies’ complete 180-degree pivot as they suddenly began suggesting that China might be interfering in elections. Nothing had changed. Frontline analysts knew the previous year that the voter data had been compromised, and the activity was continuing. But suddenly the language changed, a dynamic captured in this remarkable email from a top intelligence expert on election cyberactivities:

“Take a minute and read through this report,” the officer wrote on December 23, 2021. “It cites some of the same intel and logic used in 2020 to say that these same units were not engaged in election influence but were instead only issue focused, to now argue that China IS influencing the [redacted] election.”

The intelligence community knew in 2020 that China had illicitly obtained voter files. Officials knew such an act met the definition of “election interference.” They simply suppressed it.

Ignoramus did the same during his Morning Joe pushback. This is not the first time Ignatius has toed a supposedly factual line that failed to withstand the test of time. In January 2017, he wrote the infamous column about incoming National Security Adviser Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The column helped force Flynn’s ouster.

What Ignatius’ column did not reveal—and what the public learned only years later—was that, days before he wrote it, the FBI had already cleared Flynn of wrongdoing and was preparing to close its investigation when the Obama White House intervened. In other words, a man the FBI believed was innocent was tarred by a column that omitted that information.

Similarly, Ignatius went on another writing tirade in 2020, arguing that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russia proved the bogus collusion story and “shreds” Trump’s claim that the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation was a hoax or witch hunt.

Three years later, the Biden Justice Department released Special Counsel John Durham’s report, which concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to warrant opening the Russia-collusion investigation.

“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law,” Durham wrote. Here is the scorecard: Truth 3, Ignoramus 0.

In closing, I would like to borrow the opening line of Ignatius’ 2017 column on Flynn to describe his own record, including his most recent hit on Morning Joe: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” mutters Marcellus. Perhaps something is rotten at The Washington Post, too.