Spies Attacked U S Elections
On July 3, 10, and 13, 2026, the White House declassified a set of U.S. intelligence records on foreign operations against the 2020 election — including NICA 2020-06885D, a National Intelligence Council assessment dated August 19, 2020, and a President’s Daily Brief item from June 25, 2020, released just six years after it was written. PDBs normally stay sealed for roughly fifty years; Kennedy’s briefs were released in 2015, Nixon’s in 2016. The documents record a Chinese “black materials” blackmail program targeting U.S. officials since at least January 2019 — including a threat against a White House official the intelligence community rated credible — Chinese collection of more than 200 million U.S. voter records, Russian proxy operations run through Andrii Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik, Iranian influence campaigns, and covert Turkish funding of U.S. municipal election campaigns.
The record cuts in every direction. The same documents show hostile services working against Joe Biden and against Donald Trump — and the IC’s own assessment that manipulating vote counts at scale would be difficult and likely detected by audits and paper trails. Voter registration data is largely public or commercially purchasable, and independent reviewers note no released document shows intrusion into a state election system. The open questions: what did foreign intelligence services do with all that data — and what does releasing the most protected document in American government signal to the services reading it in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran?
Eric Garland is an intelligence analyst personally sanctioned by the Russian Federation in May 2022 for his work on Russian intelligence operations. He is the author of the 2016 “Game Theory” thread, named by The New York Times as one of the 25 most important tweets in history.
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SOURCES
White House Government Transparency Task Force, disclosure statement, July 13, 2026 National Intelligence Council, NICA 2020-06885D, “Foreign Threats to 2020 US Federal Elections,” August 19, 2020 (declassified July 3, 2026) President’s Daily Brief, June 25, 2020 (declassified July 10, 2026) ODNI, Intelligence Community Assessment, “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections,” March 2021 CIA, historical President’s Daily Brief releases, September 2015 and August 2016 CSIS, Emily Harding, “What Do the Election Security Documents Say About Chinese Interference in U.S. Elections?,” July 2026 GlobalSecurity.org, “Overview Analysis — The July 2026 Election Documents Release,” July 17, 2026
