FBI Director Kash Patel feeds 2020 election conspiracy theories with documents about unverified tip
WASHINGTON — FBI Director Kash Patel said this week the bureau had shared “alarming” — but unsubstantiated — allegations about manipulation of the 2020 election with a Republican member of Congress.
“The FBI has located documents which detail alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the CCP,” Patel wrote, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “I have immediately declassified the material and turned the documents over to the Chairman Grassley for further review.”
Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The unsubstantiated claim promoted by Patel, which an unidentified confidential human source gave to the FBI in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term, asserts that the Chinese mass-produced driver’s licenses to be used in a mail-in ballot scheme. Patel linked to an article written by John Solomon, whom Trump appointed alongside Patel in 2022 to represent him before the National Archives and Records Administration on matters related to his presidential records.
The article Patel promoted mentioned that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has seized fake licenses that were arriving mostly from China and Hong Kong around the time the FBI received the tip about the election plot. According to a 2020 news release from CBP, most of the seized licenses “were for college-age students,” a population that has historically sought licenses with fake birthdays so underage students can get into bars and purchase alcohol.
No evidence of widespread or systemic voter fraud affecting the 2020 election has been found, despite allegations promoted by Trump and his allies since he lost that year’s presidential race.
The FBI did not comment beyond Patel’s post, referring questions to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Grassley sent a letter Tuesday asking Patel for additional information about how the intelligence information report was handled.
Patel and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino have faced increased pressure from the online right to bring more drastic change to the bureau — and at a time when they have been debunking some of the conspiracy theories they promoted when they were conservative commentators.
A former senior FBI official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the bureau produces hundreds of reports every day based on such tips, which do not always pan out.
Sometimes they are recalled or edited for a number of reasons, the former FBI official said. Those reasons could be that agents found the information to be false or that the sources of the information had been discredited.
A second former senior FBI official, who also asked not to be named, said they were not familiar with the report but said both the Chinese and the Russian governments have spread false claims about fake ballots to aggravate divisions between Americans.
The second former FBI official suggested that Patel share “the information with both Republicans and Democrats so there can be a balanced look and heal the country instead of causing more distrust and discontent playing into the hands of our foreign enemies.”
Rick Hasen, an election law expert, said that Patel’s post “might feed the MAGA base” but that what he was promoting was an uncorroborated story of unknown origin “with no evidence that anything actually happened, and certainly no evidence that any ballots were cast or illegal voters were even registered to vote using state identifications.”
Hasen said there has long been a “cottage industry of people” making false or vastly exaggerated claims of election fraud or portraying administrative errors as acts of malice. While there are occasionally instances of voting fraud, Hasen added, they tend to be isolated and small.
