One of Trump’s Declassified Documents Raises Major Red Flags

Former intelligence officials have singled out a recently declassified memo in Donald Trump’s recent 2020 election-related document dump as warranting a deeper investigation.

The Steady State, a group of former national security and intelligence officials, has called for an independent probe into a three-page CIA note on China titled “Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018-2020.” The document’s date and author are redacted, and it’s not clear where the memo came from within the folds of the CIA.

An analysis by the group found that it “departs in both style and format” from CIA drafting culture, and does not include the tell-tale signs of a CIA review.

Yet Trump directly quoted the file during his national prime-time address on July 16, ignoring its dubious origin.

“In mid-2018 the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S. president in an effort to reduce the U.S. president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his re-election,” Trump read from the document. “Isn’t that nice?”

Over the span of his 25-minute speech, Trump repeated thoroughly debunked claims that there was interference in the 2020 presidential election, and that the intelligence community had intentionally withheld information from him during his first term about China’s attempts to undermine U.S. election integrity.

Trump leveraged the CIA memo to implore the Justice Department to “fire those involved in the cover-up” and “file criminal charges if appropriate.”

But former intelligence officials have been wary of the document’s narrow perspective and thin context, suggesting that it could be a response to a targeted request from someone within the administration, MS NOW reported Tuesday.

Steven Cash, executive director of The Steady State and a former CIA and Department of Homeland Security official, told the digital news organization that he planned to send a letter Tuesday to top lawmakers about the note’s “anomalies.”

“It is particularly dangerous when intelligence products are presented piecemeal to the American people,” Cash wrote. “Confidence in the Intelligence Community is predicated not only on what it ultimately knows, but on the integrity of how its work is produced and presented.” ...