The release of declassified intelligence documents by President Donald Trump last week showed that US intelligence had been withholding details of Chinese efforts to steal voter registration data during Trump’s first term. Declassified memos from intelligence community bureaucrats showed the information was deliberately omitted from the daily intelligence briefings Trump received in his first term.
This shows, according to GAI’s Eric Eggers, “they don’t just get the big things wrong. They lied about the big things to the American people.”
Trump released declassified, partially redacted memos after his speech to the nation last week as evidence of significant election-security vulnerabilities, foreign collection of voter data, and weaknesses in voter-registration systems. The memos showed intelligence officials open bragging about how they were withholding this information from Trump’s Presidential Daily Brief. One email from an FBI official said, “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point,” while another noted, “We have deliberately massaged our one pending [President’s Daily Brief] to avoid any direct links to the election.”
“We now have these records that the intelligence agencies kept information that China was hacking elections and, according to some of the documents, trying to potentially favor Joe Biden,” Eggers said. “They kept that from Donald Trump in 2020.”
Independent analyses of the documents generally concluded that while they describe real security concerns and intelligence findings, they do not show that election results were changed or that widespread election fraud occurred in 2020.
Appearing on Greg Kelly’s Newsmax program, Eggers was unsparing in criticizing what he called “deep state actors.” “These documents show that they’ve known the truth all along, but they didn’t trust the American people to be honest with them because they were afraid of how it might benefit Donald Trump.”
In a short segment, Eggers appeared with former Trump White House aide Hogan Gidley to discuss the records release, which Trump offered as an argument for passing the SAVE Act to buttress election integrity and require identification to vote and proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Kelly plays a video of outgoing Republican Sen. Thom Tillis arguing against the SAVE Act, saying it cannot be implemented. Gidley noted that a vote in the House of Representatives this week that would add the bill to a reconciliation package is scheduled for Wednesday, which would then go to the Senate where only 51 votes would be needed to pass it in that reconciliation package.
