Did the White House order up a CIA document to support Trump’s claims on China election interference?

A nonprofit representing hundreds of former U.S. intelligence officials called on Congress and inspectors general to open an investigation into one of the documents declassified by the White House during President Donald Trump’s recent address denigrating U.S. elections.

In a letter Tuesday, Steady State, a nonpartisan organization composed of over 400 former U.S. national security officials, warned that the CIA document in question may have been created specifically to bolster Trump’s false claims of Chinese interference in the 2020 election. 

The group also said that the document may have been drafted with direct input from the White House and in violation of the CIA’s internal guidelines for creating intelligence reports.

“The note is probably a cherry-picked compilation based on genuine CIA raw-reporting streams, probably assembled at White House direction for the President’s speech,” its letter, addressed to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee and the inspectors general of the U.S. Intelligence Community and the CIA, reads.

“Agency leadership most likely bypassed CIA’s analytic directorate and tasked Directorate of Operations personnel to draft it — possibly with input from the White House Transparency Task Force — while redacting any accountable feature: no author, date, office, serial, sourcing, or agency review,” it continued.

Steady State based its claims on its own internal assessment of the document. However, it called for “a thorough, independent, investigation by the oversight Committees” because its review was “preliminary” and “limited to the document as presented on the White House website.”

The document, titled “Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018 – 2020,” included assertions that China sought to influence the outcome and specifically wanted Trump to lose. Steady State noted that the document lacked context and did not include any definitive conclusions from the U.S. Intelligence Community regarding foreign interference in the 2020.

Trump quoted the document during the address and used it to assert that “members of the Deep State” deliberately withheld information on “China’s sinister election meddling” from “both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible.”

Beyond having its creation date redacted, Steady State said the document contained several other abnormalities. 

“The CIA Note presents a number of anomalies: they contain no identifiable office, author, scope note, serial number, sourcing methodology, production mechanism, and departs in both style and format from ‘typical’ CIA analytic products,” it said.

“The integrity of the intelligence community is foundational to our democracy. When intelligence is perceived to be used to support a political narrative rather than objectively inform policymakers, its value is diminished,” it added. “We urge the Committees, and the Inspectors General, to thoroughly examine these anomalies.”