The American intelligence community has a serious problem it can no longer hide.

Newly declassified documents are pulling back the curtain.

And now the deep state’s plot to rig the 2020 election got exposed in the most unreal way.

What the Watchdog Found — and What It Cost

Barry Zulauf served as the intelligence community’s independent ombudsman — essentially the internal watchdog tasked with keeping the whole apparatus honest. In 2021, he published a report concluding that the IC had massaged intelligence about both Russian and Chinese election interference. That report has since become standard reference material for young spies in training, Zulauf told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Tradecraft classes in Italy, Canada, Israel, and other nations now study the way senior American officials manipulated intelligence about Russian and Chinese election meddling according to their personal stance on President Donald Trump, Zulauf told the DCNF.

Think about that for a moment. The United States, which built the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in human history, is now the cautionary tale other countries use to train their analysts on what politicized intelligence looks like.

Back home, the damage has also prompted institutional changes. The intelligence community added new instruction on politicization to Analysis 101 — the orientation course for the Office of Director of National Intelligence — along with a seminar on objectivity for the broader IC, per Zulauf.

But adding a class on objectivity does not undo what was done.

Suppressed Warnings, Buried Reports, and a Law That Got Ignored

A 2004 law requires spies to produce reporting “independent of political considerations.” New declassified documents expose senior officials operating in ways that violated that professional standard directly.

The wrangling that prompted Zulauf’s 2021 report came into sharper focus recently when a Government Transparency Task Force led by journalist John Solomon released newly declassified documents. Those documents center on a National Security Agency report that addressed Communist China and the 2016 election. That report was supposed to be distributed in December 2018. Fourteen months later it was still sitting on a shelf. Senior officials called it too “sensational.”

The delayed dissemination of that election interference intelligence fueled concerns about a years-long coverup, senior intelligence officials said, according to the emails the task force released.

And the NSA report was not the only thing buried. In October 2020, two intelligence officials raised concerns about Chinese election influence activities that other career analysts dismissed, according to the Zulauf report. CIA management then pressured those officials to suppress their concerns, the report states.

Zulauf’s own report documented the institutional rot in plain language. “What began as mischaracterization of IC analytic assessments by ODNI officials escalated into an ongoing widespread perception in the workforce about politicization and loss of analytic objectivity throughout the community on the topics of Russian and Chinese election influence and interference,” he wrote in an academic article accompanying his 2021 report.

The China analysts had a specific reason for holding back. Zulauf’s report notes that “analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tended to disagree with the Administration’s policies, saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies.”

That is a confession, not a policy disagreement. Career bureaucrats decided on their own that the President of the United States should not receive accurate intelligence because they did not like his policies toward Communist China.

John Ratcliffe, who served as Director of National Intelligence at the time and now serves as CIA Director, agreed that China had sought to interfere in the election. Ratcliffe said that “similar actions by Russia and China are assessed and communicated to policymakers” — a direct pushback on the career analysts who had worked to keep that assessment from reaching decision-makers.

President Trump revealed in a primetime speech earlier this year that American spy agencies suppressed evidence that Communist China hacked into massive reams of voter data from his Presidential Daily Brief.

The Officials Implicated — and Where They Ended Up

Zulauf confirmed to the DCNF that the senior IC leaders implicated in his report included Deputy Director of National Intelligence Beth Sanner. Most of the documents Zulauf used to prepare the report still remain classified, so the full picture of how Sanner politicized intelligence is not yet publicly known.

But Sanner’s connections to the broader Russiagate saga are already on the public record. Sanner told reporter Tim Weiner that she helped to declassify the discredited January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that touched off years of allegations that President Trump’s 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia, according to the 2025 book The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century. She declassified it in a way that protected former CIA Director John Brennan’s key source for the document, who is allegedly expatriated Russian national Oleg Smolenkov.

In August 2025, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revoked Sanner’s security clearance.

And there is another figure worth noting. A senior CIA official who was responsible for Trump’s Presidential Daily Brief for two years is directly implicated in the 2021 watchdog report. That official is now a CNN contributor on matters of national security.

So the people who allegedly manipulated the intelligence the President was supposed to receive are now on cable television telling the American public what to think about national security.

What This Pattern Actually Means

The mainstream press has largely dismissed concerns about politicized intelligence as conspiratorial. Spy schools across the developed world apparently disagree.

What the Zulauf report documents is not a single rogue analyst making a bad call. It is a pattern. Senior officials at the CIA and ODNI worked to keep the President from receiving accurate assessments about Communist China’s election activities because they personally opposed his foreign policy. A report on Chinese election activity tied to 2016 sat buried for over a year because releasing it might make the agencies look like part of the “deep state.” Analysts who raised concerns about Chinese meddling in October 2020 were pressured by CIA management to stand down.

This is the permanent political class doing what it has done for decades — deciding that its institutional preferences matter more than its legal obligations.

The 2004 law requiring intelligence to be produced independent of political considerations exists for a reason. The men and women who hold the most sensitive jobs in the federal government are supposed to deliver the truth to elected officials, not curate it based on whether they agree with the sitting administration’s trade policy toward Beijing.

But that is exactly what happened. And the record on it is now so well documented that foreign intelligence services use it to train their own analysts on the dangers of letting political sentiment corrupt the product.

The questions millions of Americans raised about how the 2020 election was conducted — about last-minute rule changes, about the suppression of inconvenient information, about the role of institutional actors working against the sitting president — look considerably less like conspiracy theory when the intelligence community’s own internal watchdog is confirming that career officials buried evidence of Chinese election interference because they opposed Trump’s policies.

That is not a fringe claim. It is the finding of a 2021 government report that spy schools in Italy, Canada, and Israel now cite as a case study in how not to run an intelligence service.

The declassified documents keep coming. The Government Transparency Task Force has more to release. And every new document that surfaces adds another layer to what is already one of the most significant institutional scandals in the history of American intelligence.

Accountability, when it arrives, tends to arrive slowly. But it does arrive.

Sources: Daily Caller News Foundation, “Textbook Bias: Deep State’s Election Interference Spin Is Now A Case Study In Spy Schools,” August 21, 2026; WND/Emily Kopp, Daily Caller News Foundation, August 21, 2026; BizPacReview, August 21, 2026; John Solomon/Just the News, Government Transparency Task Force declassified documents; Conservative Institute, “Declassified NSA Memo Reveals Deputy Director Blocked Election Threat Report to Dodge ‘Deep State’ Label”; Tim Weiner, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, 2025.