Spy chiefs ‘stonewalling’ on foreign interference in election

FPI / December 23, 2020

The Intelligence Community (IC) is “purposely stonewalling” assessments and reports on foreign interference in the 2020 election for political reasons, an intelligence source told The Epoch Times.

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was notified by “career intelligence officials” on Dec. 16 that the IC was unable to meet the Dec. 18 deadline set by President Donald Trump's executive order to report on foreign threats to this year’s election.

Intelligence officials said the delay was due to the IC receiving relevant new information since the election and the fact that a “number of agencies have not finished coordinating on the product.”

“I think that’s dishonesty on the part of the bureaucrats inside the intelligence community,” Bart Marcois, former principal deputy assistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs under the Bush administration, told The Epoch Times.

The spy chiefs are “slow-rolling this, stalling it, so that this report cannot form the basis of an appeal to the Supreme Court, or to state legislatures, or to the Congress to disregard the electoral college outcome as reported by the disputed states,” Marcois said.

“The dominant theme is that the bureaucrats that are permanent employees of the government have spent the last four years ignoring the authority of the elected president,” Marcois said. “It’s ironic because Biden, in my opinion, is very responsive to the needs, the wishes, and the demands of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Trump's executive order, which he issued in 2018, directs the U.S. government to impose automatic sanctions on foreign nations, individuals, and entities found to be involved in attempts to interfere in U.S. elections.

Gary Berntsen, a former CIA senior operations officer and chief of station, told The Epoch Times that “the result of the 2020 election is still in question since there are legal cases available. There are witnesses, sources, and now, we’ve seen the first reports from the technical side. For anyone to contradict that is foolish."

Berntsen added: “Would it be required to have 800 communist Cubans parachute into Michigan and all those cities? That’s what the people want for evidence? We need a couple of brigades of communists to parachute into the United States, and even if they did that, it would still be disputed.”

According to Berntsen, there are a number of foreign countries interfering in U.S. elections, including Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran.

Attorney Sidney Powell said there’s more than enough evidence to prompt Trump to use his 2018 executive order on foreign interference.

“Given the level of foreign interference we can demonstrate, and the country has evidence in our filings of foreign interference in the election, it’s more than sufficient to trigger the president’s executive order from 2018 that gives him all kinds of power — to do everything from seizing assets, to freeze things, demand the impoundment of the machines,” Powell said.

Free Press International