The FBI seized nearly 20,000 fake Chinese driver's licenses at a Chicago airport in 2020 – all headed to America's cities.
Now declassified memos confirm what those shipments were for: Beijing had your voter registration data and planned to use it.
The spies who knew made a choice – and Devin Nunes just found out what it was.
Declassified Intel Shows China Accessed 2020 Voter Registration Data
The spy community's own watchdog caught them.
Barry Zulauf – analytic ombudsman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – reviewed the intelligence community's handling of the 2020 election and documented what he found in a January 2021 report.
The conclusion was damning.
China analysts "appeared reluctant to have their analysis brought forward because they tended to disagree with the Administration's policies," Zulauf wrote.
One analyst said it out loud: "I don't want my intelligence going to the White House where it will be used by that vulgarian in the Oval Office to support policies against China with which I personally disagree."
That is a federal intelligence officer using contempt for the sitting president as justification to withhold national security intelligence from him.
Zulauf documented that identical actions by Russia were labeled "interference" while the same Chinese actions were softened or ignored entirely.
The double standard was not accidental.
China Used Fake Driver's Licenses in a Mail-In Ballot Scheme and the FBI Stayed Quiet
A declassified April 2020 National Intelligence Council memo confirmed what Beijing was doing with that data.
Chinese intelligence officials accessed voter registration files across multiple states – files containing driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers – and used them to analyze the 2020 presidential election.
The FBI grew alarmed enough to produce its own internal report warning China was plotting to mass-produce fraudulent driver's licenses to obtain mail-in ballots for Joe Biden.
CBP officers found the operation taking shape.
At Chicago O'Hare in the first half of 2020, agents seized 1,513 shipments containing 19,888 counterfeit U.S. driver's licenses – the majority arriving from China and Hong Kong.
That report was recalled in September 2020 – the day after FBI Director Chris Wray testified to Congress that he had seen no large-scale voter fraud efforts.
When Britain discovered in 2024 that China had hacked 40 million British voter records, the United Kingdom erupted – investigations, headlines, reforms.
American intelligence agencies knew the same thing had happened here four years earlier and said nothing.
Nunes Calls It a Scandal and Launches an Investigation
Devin Nunes chairs the President's Intelligence Advisory Board – the civilian body that oversees America's 17 spy agencies – and he didn't pull punches after Just the News broke the story this week.
"We ran a decade-long investigation in the Congress into China, and so this new bombshell that you just dropped is very concerning to me," Nunes said.
"This information was likely around in 2019, probably in 2020. We're going to have to unpack this and figure out why this didn't get to the Congress and why this didn't get out to the American public."
He named it directly: "Clearly, this is a scandal that's brewing."
The PIAB probe fits the board's existing mandate precisely.
Just weeks ago, CIA Director John Ratcliffe – acting on PIAB recommendations – retracted or revised 19 intelligence reports produced over the past decade for political bias and poor tradecraft.
One flagged report suggested that CIA analysts were spending time assessing whether traditional motherhood roles implied a danger to society.
That is what the intelligence community was producing while China was walking off with your voter data.
Sen. Tom Cotton called the retractions long overdue, saying the Obama and Biden administrations had mixed intelligence and politics far too often.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., is now demanding Trump declassify and release all evidence of China's 2020 meddling.
The Deep State Covered Up China Election Interference to Undermine Trump
Intel analysts who decide a president doesn't deserve national security information because they hate his policies aren't doing their jobs – they're running their own foreign policy from a government cubicle.
The Russian collusion narrative ran for three years – investigations, impeachments, wall-to-wall media coverage – all built on the claim that foreign election interference demanded accountability.
The same people who built that narrative watched China access voter registration data across multiple states, watched FBI evidence of a mail-in ballot operation take shape, and made a deliberate internal decision: the vulgarian didn't need to know.
Nunes has spent his career exposing exactly this pattern – from the Steele Dossier to the letter of 51 intelligence officials who falsely labeled Hunter Biden's laptop Russian disinformation two weeks before the 2020 election.
The PIAB probe he just launched puts the analysts who buried the China intelligence directly in his crosshairs.
Sources:
- John Solomon, "Chi-SpyGate: Intel board to probe if spy agencies withheld China election secrets over politics," Just the News, March 22, 2026.
- Jerry Dunleavy, "US intel hid Chinese 2020 election meddling from Trump because they opposed his policies, memo says," Just the News, March 17, 2026.
- John Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy, "Britain had meltdown when China hacked voter files, but U.S. intel kept it secret in America," Just the News, March 16, 2026.
- "CIA retracts and revises reports for 'bias' after review by Trump-appointed board," NBC News, February 20, 2026.
- Sen. Tom Cotton statement on CIA intelligence retractions, February 20, 2026.
