Grassley launders new MAGA smear campaign against the FBI
But this time the smear is coming from inside the house.
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“Chris Wray’s FBI wasn’t looking out for the American people — it was looking to save its own image,” Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley warbled in a press release last week.
The nonagenarian from Iowa is big mad about a supposed coverup of a source who could prove President Trump’s bogus theories about election fraud in 2020.
“These records smack of political decision-making and prove the Wray-led FBI to be a deeply broken institution,” he rambled.
And FBI Director Kash Patel, a former conspiracy theorist for hire, was only too happy to pour gas on the fire.
“Former FBI leadership withheld the facts and misled the public on China’s 2020 election interference. And they did so for political gain,” he tweeted. “This FBI is exposing all of it and giving Americans the truth they deserve.”
But as with so many conspiracies laundered through Grassley, this one falls apart the second you look at it.
The source (and the source’s source, and the source’s source’s source)
In August 2020, the Albany Field Office of the FBI received a tip from a single, confidential source who claimed to have a subsource in China. That subsource had his own subsource inside the Chinese government who claimed that China was sending fake driver’s licenses to America so that sympathetic Chinese expats could cast fraudulent votes for Joe Biden.
The Albany office blasted out an intelligence information report (IIR) to every corner of the government announcing that "Chinese Government Production and Export of Fraudulent US Drivers Licenses to Chinese Sympathizers in the United States, in Order to Create Tens of Thousands of Fraudulent Mail-in Votes for US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden.” At which point, high ranking officials at the FBI flipped out and forced the report to be recalled because … well, fill in the blank.
The Trump administration would like us to believe that the report was spiked because it contradicted FBI Director Chris Wray’s testimony to Congress on September 24, 2020, that “we have not seen historically any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it is by mail or otherwise.”
“Previous FBI leadership chose to play politics and withhold key information from the American people — exposing the weaponization of law enforcement for political purposes during the height of the 2020 election season,” Patel and his Assistant FBI Director Dan Bongino blustered in a press release last month.
John Solomon, the disgraced former editor of The Hill who set up shop as “Just the News” after his entanglement in Rudy Guliani’s efforts to smear Joe Biden with lies about Burisma was revealed, broke the story, writing last month that the IIR was “recalled from intelligence agencies at about the time that then-FBI Director Chris Wray testified there were no known plots of foreign interference ahead of the 2020 election” and implied that the FBI failed to connect it to a story about fake IDs from China seized at O’Hare Airport the month before.
“They also said the intelligence report was recalled within a few weeks and the allegations never fully investigated, on the grounds that the source needed to be re-interviewed,” he wrote conspiratorially. “But, in fact, another agency, US Customs and Border Protection, had intercepted nearly 20,000 fake licenses around the time the intelligence came in a possible corroboration of the report, officials said.”
Fox News hyped it under the caption “FBI blocked probe into alleged Chinese 2020 election meddling to protect Wray from fallout, documents show.”
And the wingnut ecosystem was happy to take it from there.
“At this stage, we need to name names! Who shielded Chris Wray? Are they still on the job? Don’t fire them. Suspend w/out pay. Suspend clearances. Investigate immediately! Indict. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!” tweeted Mike Flynn.
But Patel, whose 2023 book “Government Gangsters” contained an “enemies list” that included Wray, did not seek an indictment. Instead, he turned the supposedly incriminating evidence over to Grassley. And a full two weeks later, after giving right-wing media a two-week head start to spin the story, Grassley finally published it last week.
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Meanwhile back in reality …
The documents suggest a much more likely explanation for the withdrawal of the IRR: The confidential source was a kook.
“We’re skeptical of this reporting based on the portions regarding COVID that veer into conspiracy theories,” one September email read, adding, “Is this subsource the same one who said that the Chinese Government had underground bases in Republican states to disperse Coronavirus?”
The source was a brand new confidential informant who “called in a complaint” and subsequently verified his story by showing FBI agents the electronic business card of a person who “does in fact live in [redacted] and have contacts overseas.” He claimed that “the Chinese government had produced a large amount of fraudulent United States drivers licenses that were secretly exported to the United States” to “allow tens of thousands of Chinese students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party to vote for US Presidential Candidate USPER Joe ((Biden)).”
The report was a cocktail of various right-wing theories floating around in mid-2020. Just three weeks after Trump sought to ban TikTok as a vector for Chinese influence, the informant alleged that “China had collected private US user data from millions of TikTok accounts, to include name, ID and address, which would allow the Chinese government to use real US persons' information to create the fraudulent drivers license.”
As then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lobbed baseless accusations at the RNC about Beijing interfering to help Biden, the informant appeared with a story to confirm it. And while Trump was babbling that “if foreign countries want to, this is an easy system to break into because they’ll do counterfeit ballots. They’ll do counterfeit ballots by the millions,” the informant was claiming that “China planned to use the fraudulent drivers licenses to account for tens of thousands of mail-in votes.”
Except TikTok does not collect users’ home addresses, much less their drivers license data. And the story about 19,888 counterfeit drivers’ licenses confiscated at O’Hare specified that the interceptions took place during the first six months of 2020, and Biden didn’t secure the nomination until June. Also, CBP noted that the IDs were mostly fakes for underage college students, most of whom did not appear to be Chinese.
But other than that … BANG UP JOB, ALBANY!
Backfilling the big lie
What followed reads as a pissing match between FBI headquarters, who recognized that unvetted informant statements feeding into the exact conspiracy theories being pushed to discredit the upcoming election were likely to be seized upon by people who didn’t care that report fell apart the second you looked at it, and the Field Office in Albany, who didn’t want their shiny report tossed in the trash.
“We know that the source is first contact and hasn’t been re-interviewed. Are you considering recalling the IIR until you can track the source down and re-interview?” someone from headquarters wrote on September 25. “Everything election is getting scrutiny and we just want to be sure we have reliable sourcing.”
“Something in the IIR process is definitely going well if we receive a call within a few hours from HQ about one of our IIRs. Nicely done!” chirped one of the chiefs in Albany to their team, reporting the interest from higher-ups.
By September 29, officials in DC were in a panic that the informant’s dubious story would become a political football, particularly since it contradicted Wray’s testimony to Congress and the conclusion of the wider intelligence community that Trump’s claims about Chinese election interference were nonsense.
Based on the conflict of this information to that of the wider USIC, the fact that it contradicts Director Wray's testimony to Congress, and the importance to the current administration, I think we should be ready to back up the IIR with a minimum of the following information and treat it like it will be going in front of the President. We're skeptical of this reporting based on the portions regarding COVID that veer into conspiracy.
Then when agents from Albany went back out to interview the informant, he said that the messages confirming his story had been deleted from Telegram by the sender. And so the IIR was withdrawn, over the objections of officials in Albany, who grumbled that pulling their work because of “political” considerations “goes directly against our organizations mission to remain apolitical and simply state what we know.”
And no one thought about it until last month, when the story was trotted out as proof that all the right-wing fairy tales about the Deep State trying to doom Trump and suppress the truth about election fraud were actually true.
We’ve seen this movie before
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Trump’s henchmen hit CTRL+F+conspiracy theory and go trawling through the FBI files to back-formulate evidence. It isn’t even the first time they grabbed up a confidential informant years later and handed him over to Grassley to parade around Congress. But it should be noted that those prior efforts imploded in spectacular fashion.
In May 2023, Republicans crowed that they’d found an informant who could confirm that “the Biden crime family” had taken millions of dollars in bribes from China. Grassley and House Oversight Chair James Comer issued a press release “demanding the FBI produce an unclassified record alleging a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national.”
After great hype, including intimations by Comer that the informant had been intimidated by the Biden administration and gone into hiding, it emerged that their star witness was Gal Luft, an Israeli-American on the run from an indictment for acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and violating sanctions on Iran.
Grassley immediately pivoted to claiming that the issue wasn’t whether Luft’s allegations were true, but rather whether the FBI pursued his obvious lies vigorously enough.
Next they hauled out Alexander Smirnov, an FBI informant who suddenly remembered in 2020 that he’d heard Ukrainian executives talking about bribing Joe and Hunter Biden three years earlier.
“For the better part of a year, I’ve been pushing the Justice Department and FBI to provide details on its handling of very significant allegations from a trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme,” Grassley and Comer vamped, releasing a cache of internal FBI documents supposedly documenting the FBI coverup.
But Smirnov’s story was riddled with holes: It matched stories being pushed at the time by Rudy Giuliani, and contradicted his own prior reports. He claimed to have traveled to Ukraine with a friend during a period when the friend never left the US, and he insisted there was corroborating footage of Hunter Biden at a hotel in Kyiv — a city Hunter never visited.
In February 2024, Smirnov was indicted for lying to the FBI, at which point Grassley pivoted again to claiming that the real scandal was the FBI coverup.
“When presented with information from a source the agency so trusted, the FBI — as exposed by Senator Grassley — sat on the document for years, without performing due diligence. It’s clear that only after Senator Grassley made the [Smirnov interview documents] public did the FBI investigate the allegations in the document,” his comms team told the Iowa politics blog BleedingHeartland.
Grassley conspiracies are even doubling back onto each other now, as “FBI whistleblower” Stephen Friend appeared on Fox News last week to explain the Chinese election informant “scandal” to host Will Cain. In 2022, Grassley touted Friend’s claims that the FBI was violating protocol to harass January 6 defendants. In fact, Friend was put on leave after refusing to arrest people who sacked the Capitol, including a member of the Three Percenters militia who stormed Congress sporting bear spray and a GoPro.
Real world games
Grassley and Patel’s reboot is no summer blockbuster. In fact, it seems to have landed with a thud — perhaps because the aging star keeps forgetting his lines.
But even so, these games of distraction have real world consequences. Former Deputy Assistant Directors Nikki Floris and Tonya Ugoretz, two agents with decades of experience each, were both pushed out because they approved the recall of the IIR. Worse, Grassley and Patel failed to redact their names from the documents, all but ensuring that they’ll face harassment or worse from Trump’s deranged fans.
Soon enough Grassley will tweet that the real scandal is the FBI’s failure to follow up on a rando informant’s fever dream. And maybe the real friends we made along the way are the ever-shorter news cycles as Grassley launders yet another lie and ruins some poor civil servant’s life.
That’s it for today
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Is there actually anyone who cares about what Chuck Grassley thinks, says or does? All most want is for him to resign.
All of this reads like they found George Orwell’s lost sequel to Animal Farm.