WASHINGTON (AP) — As U.S. spy agencies ramped up their work to catch foreign meddling in this year’s election, a team of CIA experts studied lessons learned from the contentious 2020 vote. Unexpectedly, their report sparked a controversy within parts of the intelligence community.
In a rare move, their study was withdrawn shortly after it was issued in the spring after rank-and-file officers protested that it failed to address the allegations of politics seeping into intelligence that arose in the 2020 election and that remain unresolved for some today.
Reissued in September, the study remains classified and its full contents aren’t publicly known. Several people familiar with the matter would say only that it included recommendations on how intelligence leaders could best examine and report election threats attributed to Russia, China and other American adversaries.
The dispute over a relatively routine study and its unusual withdrawal highlight ongoing concerns over how to address the varying foreign threats to U.S. elections — including disinformation, cyber espionage and the amplification of existing divisions within American society. In an increasingly polarized America, some of those tensions have spilled over inside the nominally apolitical world of intelligence, some former officers say.
Some officers have alleged intelligence leaders in 2020 played down findings on Russia to suit the demands of former President Donald Trump, who fired a director of national intelligence in one dispute over Moscow’s election meddling. Others say election-related intelligence on China in particular was wrongly played down out of a belief that politicians would misuse it.