Newly declassified intelligence emails reveal that decisions were made by National Security Agency (NSA) leadership to block reports of Chinese influence in American elections from reaching President Donald Trump.
Four pages of emails, all dated March 13, 2020, were released on Aug. 18 by the White House Government Transparency Task Force.
According to one email—written by an unidentified NSA employee following a meeting about intelligence reporting foreign efforts to target the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in the United States beginning in 2014—internal concerns were raised about the agency’s suppression of the reports.
“We did not know why we were here, trying to defend the election and identify threats to it, if we were unable to actually report what those threats were because of issues like this,” the NSA employee wrote.
According to another email, NSA analysts had proposed releasing the reports in 2018.
Task force officials are digging through files to determine why evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to influence the elections was not passed on to the president, Congress, and some intelligence leaders, including then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, now CIA director.
Certain aspects of the reports on the Chinese election influence were censored because “it was judged that some of the details regarding the 2016 election were ‘sensational’ and so required a limited distribution [redacted],” an NSA analyst wrote, noting that colleagues tried for 16 months to get the information published.
“People higher in the chain than us—including but not limited to people at ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]—time and again failed to make real decisions in a timely manner,” they said.
Intelligence officers were told in February 2020 that the office approved the report, and analysts prioritized its delivery, but the NSA deputy director blocked its release, according to the documents.
George Barnes served as NSA deputy director from 2017 to 2023.
“[The deputy director] explained that he was concerned that releasing the [redacted] at this time—in the current political climate, with an acting [director of national intelligence (DNI)] who had been tasked … to ‘clean house’ in the intelligence community, and with an administration that is suspicious of the [intelligence community] and aggressive in removing anyone who stand in their way—would damage NSA’s credibility,” the analyst wrote, referring to Trump appointee Richard Grenell, who became acting DNI on Feb. 20, 2020.
The analyst said the deputy director was concerned that releasing the information could be viewed as political in nature because of the two-year delay.
“I lacked the courage to point out that we, [redacted], had processed the information in a timely manner, and the delay in releasing it was due in part to decisions and inaction on the part of people in the room,” the analyst wrote.
According to the analyst, the deputy director also sought to keep the NSA’s reputation separate from the CIA, FBI, and ODNI—agencies he perceived “had been tarred as hosting or being part of the ‘deep state.’”
The analyst said the deputy director thought publishing the report would “destroy that trust.”
“He felt the questioning of NSA that would ensue would have ramifications on the credibility of NSA reporting overall and would result in morale problems among the broader NSA workforce, a la when the [redacted],” the analyst wrote.
Other elements of the gathered intelligence were excluded from reporting because it would have been impossible to conceal the identity of members of Congress, the analyst said. Such cases require special approval, as dictated by the “Gates Procedures,” established by Robert Gates, former director of Central Intelligence, in 1992.
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