The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating newly declassified FBI documents that describe “alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the [Chinese Communist Party],” FBI Director Kash Patel said Monday.
A once-hidden report alleges that China was making thousands of fake U.S. driver’s licenses for use in the 2020 election to validate bogus mail-in ballots. The exact contents of that report, however, are under committee investigation because of how it was handled during former President Joe Biden’s administration. If the report is true, it would be one of the strongest confirmations to date that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, as many have argued.
The current conversation about this report started when Committee Chair Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sent Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi a May 5 letter seeking certain documents, including the Sept. 25, 2020, Intelligence Information Report (IIR) from the FBI’s Albany Field Office. In that letter, Grassley indicated that he had requested numerous documents during the previous administration, and his requests went unfulfilled.
Patel declassified documents, including the Sept. 25 IIR, and handed them over to the committee. Neither the FBI nor Grassley’s office was willing to share the IIR publicly when asked on Tuesday.
The IIR has raised more questions, and in a June 17 letter, Grassley asked Patel for more information related to the IIR “to better understand the decision-making process of your predecessor’s FBI.” Patel’s predecessor is former FBI Director Christopher Wray.
According to Grassley’s letter, The IIR was “recalled in order to re-interview the source,” and IIR recipients had been instructed to “destroy all copies of the original report and remove the original report from all computer holdings.”
Patel told Just the News, that the documents and report he gave the committee included “allegations of plans from the CCP to manufacture fake driver’s licenses and ship them into the United States for the purpose of facilitating fraudulent mail-in ballots — allegations which, while substantiated, were abruptly recalled and never disclosed to the public.”
Grassley wants “all records relating to [the] re-interview” of that source; email conversations between FBI agents in relation to this case, and details about who decided to recall the IIR, the rationale for that recall, and an explanation for why Wray “required the original IIR to be destroyed, whether this practice is consistent with the FBI’s past and current practice, and how it comports with federal record preservation requirements.”
By July 1 Grassley wants to know what investigations the FBI has done, or plans to do, to assess the accuracy of the allegations in the IIR.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
