Sometimes music artists change their names for marketing purposes. My ex-Washington Post colleague @IgnatiusPost — AKA David Ignatius — may want to consider a last name change to Ignoramus after his latest appearance on Morning Joe.
He claimed with a straight face that the documents President Donald Trump posted on China meddling last week proved it was no big deal. To make his case, he pointed to the 2020 National Intelligence Council assessments that the president released concerning China’s activity and noted, correctly, that U.S. intel concluded China thought about but ultimately did not activate election interference in the 2020 election.
But what old Ignoramus ignored (yes, alliteration was intentional) was the whole point of President Trump’s news conference. The president showed that evidence of China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million American voter registration files was suppressed from those assessments by career officials who boasted they had “massaged” Trump’s briefings and set up a “shadow government” to suppress intelligence. The suppression was so profoundly disturbing that the CIA’s top election interference official wrote his colleagues that it “boggles the mind” that the intelligence community would keep such information from a president or the American people.
Contrary to Ignoramus’ claims today, the evidence Trump made public may actually prove for the first time that China actually may have engaged in “election interference” in 2020 and since. That’s not my word. It’s the term the National Intelligence Council says is accurate to use when a foreign power targets voter registration data, like China did in 2020.
Just in case Ignoramus missed it, I’ll highlight this sentence in the NIC’s October 16, 2020 report that Trump released. ““Election interference is a subset of election influence targeted at the technical aspects of the election, including voter registration, casting and counting of ballots and reporting of results.” In other words, the compromising of election voter registration data is by the definition of the IC an act of election interference. The NSA’s own raw reports clearly state that China “compromised” and “leaked” sensitive voter data beyond what is available publicly. In 2022, the NSA became especially concerned that China had escalated its exploitation of voter data by assigning a “CNE.” That’s a person or unit who are hackers and cyberthieves. Great Britain’s voter files are commercially available in limited form like America’s. But China got versions of the British that caused the Biden administration to indict China for hacking 40 million British voter files. The British government called it a “malicious” interference in their election. In 2021, the Biden Justice Department indicted two Iranian hackers for accessing just 100,000 voter files from a single state where it is also was commercially available. They were charged with criminally interfering in the 2020 election even though voter files are commercial available in limited form. If China’s acquisition of 40 million files in Great Britain and Iran’s acquisition of 100,000 files in America were both charged as criminal election interference, it would seem the acquisition of 220 million voter files almost certainly would be considered by the intelligence community to be an act of interference. The president made no allegation in the speech that votes were flipped by machines. The intelligence backs that up. But you don’t need flipped votes to have election interference. The illicit acquisition of voter files meets the text book definition.
That was the president’s point and one the infamous Post columnist ignored in his Morning Joe diatribe: the suppression of the voter file breaches and other Chinese malign actions made the 2020 assessments inaccurate or misleading.
By 2021, after Trump left office, intelligence community officials marveled at the complete 180 degree pivot the Biden spy agencies did by suddenly suggesting China might be interfering in elections. Nothing had changed. The voter data was known by frontline analysts to have been compromised the year before and was continuing. But all of sudden the language changed, a dynamic captured in this gem of an email from a top intelligence expert on election cyberactivities.
“Take a minute a read through this report,” the officer wrote on Dec. 23, 2021. “It cites some of the same intel and logic used in 2020 to say that these same units were not engaged in election influence but were instead only issue focused, to now argue that the China IS influencing the [redacted election.”]
The intelligence community knew in 2020 that China had illicitly obtained voter files. They knew such an act met the definition of “election interference.” They just suppressed it. And Ignoramus did the same on his Morning Joe pushback.
Finally, this isn’t the first time Ignatius has towed a supposedly factual line that did not stand the test of time. In January 2017, he wrote the infamous column about incoming National Security Adviser Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The column forced the ouster of Flynn.
What Ignatius’ column did not reveal — and we only learned years later — was that days before he wrote the column, the FBI had already cleared Flynn of any wrongdoing and was shutting down the investigation when the Obama White House intervened. In other words, a man the FBI believed was innocent was tarred by a column missing that information.
Similarly, Ignatius went on a new writing tirade claiming in 2020 arguing that the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia proved the bogus collusion story and that it “shreds” Trump’s claim that the FBI Crossfire Hurricane probe was a hoax or a witchhunt.
Three years later, the Biden DOJ released Special Prosecutor John Durham’s report that concluded there wasn’t an iota of evidence to warrant the opening of the Russia collusion probe. “Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the (Justice) Department and FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law,” Durham wrote.
OK. Here’s your scorecard. Truth 3, Ignoramus 0.
In closing, I’d like to borrow the opening line of Ignatius’ 2017 column on Flynn to perhaps describe his own record, including his most recent hit on Morning Joe.
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” mutters Marcellus.
Perhaps it is rotten at The Washington Post too.
John Solomon is the CEO of Just the News but has taken a brief leave of absence as the Editor in Chief so he can work as an unpaid special government employee identifying documents the Trump White House can declassify for the American public.
Reposted with permission from X by John Solomon.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.