President Donald Trump has released a number of documents about his 2020 election win, but he continues to hide documents that Congress ordered he make public.
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New York Times intelligence reporter Dustin Volz wrote Thursday that out of all of the classified information Trump has released in recent months, he’s still holding back documents that show foreign meddling in the 2024 election.
Trump has been promoting a conspiracy theory that he won the 2020 election using a variety of excuses, such as undocumented people voting, vote-by-mail being a scam and foreign interference. Speaking to the public about the matter in a national address, Trump put a lot of the blame on China.
That said, the showed there was meddling by Iran against Trump, meddling by Russia for Trump and “a dissenting minority view that China took ‘at least some steps’ intended to undermine Mr. Trump.” Those steps were obtaining publicly available voter information, according to Trump’s report.
Former CIA official Larry Pfeiffer told the Times that anything revealed by the president must be in the public interest, and items held back “need to meet the same balancing test.”
“Picking and choosing what intelligence to disclose is the prerogative of any president, a tradition presidents have observed since the modern classification system was established during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations,” the report said. Pfeiffer alleged Trump has weaponized the intelligence classification like never before. Those decisions have “gone largely unchecked while appearing to be driven primarily by political and revenge agendas.”
During the Biden administration, the Justice Department issued federal indictments against both Russian and Iranian people running operations.
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In July, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee asked Bill Pulte, the then-acting director of national intelligence, the intelligence report on the 2024 election. It hasn’t happened. The law requires a public assessment to be released within 60 days of the election, but the administration hasn’t followed that law, the Times cited.
“The intelligence community is currently in violation of multiple statutes designed to ensure that Congress understands the full scope of foreign adversary plans and intentions this cycle,” the letter alleges.
A new piece of legislation proposed by Rep. Jason Crow (D-Co.) would withhold funding from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence until Congress gets its report. He attached the measure to the annual intelligence funding reauthorization bill.
Volz alleged that ‘Trump’s approach — and the extent to which his allies extol the virtues of those efforts — is without precedent, according to former intelligence officials and experts on government transparency.”
Thus far, Trump has been willing to declassify details about UFO investigations, the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy and many of the files around the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. A 2024 election intelligence assessment remains beyond reach.
Julia Curlee, who briefly served on the White House National Security Council in the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, said that the information on the 2020 election or the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s Russia ties, the administration had engaged in “Olympic-level cherry-picking.”
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