Sam Cooper

Intel warned of tens of thousands of illegal votes via fake IDs tied to CCP-linked students; FBI shut it down days after Wray denied foreign interference.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley announced that his panel will launch a formal investigation into why the FBI in September 2020 ordered the withdrawal and destruction of an explosive “raw intelligence” report alleging that Beijing harvested American private identity data from millions of TikTok accounts, enabling Chinese intelligence to manufacture fraudulent driver’s licenses that “would allow tens of thousands of Chinese students” to cast mail-in ballots in favor of Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election.

Grassley confirmed receipt of the now-declassified document and said it raises “serious national‑security concerns that need to be fully investigated by the FBI.” The Senate Judiciary Committee is now requesting internal communications, a formal justification for the FBI’s “substantive recall” of the document, and a review of the FBI’s compliance with federal intelligence record-keeping laws.

The pre-election document does not assert that fraudulent ballots were cast, and explicitly warns that the information should not be actioned without FBI coordination. But the scale and specificity of the allegations—now under Senate scrutiny—have dramatically reignited questions over how U.S. intelligence agencies handled politically sensitive reports implicating the Chinese Communist Party in election interference.

According to Fox News, the heavily redacted FBI intelligence now under investigation has declassified sections that reveal the potential of a Beijing-directed voter fraud campaign designed to leverage Chinese international students, fraudulent ID records mailed into U.S. states, and populations sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party living in America, all in efforts to elect Joe Biden over Donald Trump.

One section of the report cited by Fox News states the subject as: “[REDACTED] Chinese Government Production and Export of Fraudulent US Drivers Licenses to Chinese Sympathizers in the United States, in Order to Create Tens of Thousands of Fraudulent Mail-In Votes for US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden, in late August 2020.”

The FBI’s source allegedly obtained the information from an identified sub-source, who claimed they obtained the information from unidentified PRC government officials. One of the report’s core claims is that in late August 2020, the Chinese government had produced a large amount of fraudulent United States drivers licenses that were secretly exported to the United States.

The memo states: “The fraudulent drivers licenses would allow tens of thousands of Chinese students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party to vote for US Presidential Candidate USPER Joe ((Biden)), despite not being eligible to vote in the United States.”

As reported yesterday by The Bureau, the FBI’s report aligns with seizures from CBP in Chicago, where officers at the International Mail Facility intercepted nearly 20,000 counterfeit U.S. driver’s licenses in the first half of 2020—the vast majority shipped from China and Hong Kong. The licenses were often destined for college-aged recipients, with many containing real ID numbers and scannable barcodes, raising alarms that they could be used for fraudulent identification.

The FBI election interference report—allegedly pulled from circulation by then-Director Christopher Wray—contained consequential assertions about TikTok, which has been identified in subsequent U.S. intelligence assessments as a Chinese information warfare and election interference asset.

The 2020 memo stated: “China had collected private US user data from millions of TikTok accounts, to include name, ID and address, which would allow the Chinese government to use real US persons’ information to create the fraudulent drivers license.” It added that the fraudulent drivers licenses were to include true ID number and true address of U.S. citizens, making them difficult to detect, and that China planned to use the fraudulent drivers licenses to account for tens of thousands of mail-in votes.

Beijing has already succeeded in directing the social video app TikTok to “censor content outside of China,” according to a classified Department of Justice brief filed last summer in a case that casts one of the world’s most popular media platforms as a Chinese Communist Party weapon poised to attack Americans during an election or geopolitical crisis in the same manner as Chinese cyber-spies and hackers that are currently buried within North American critical infrastructure.

Yet the FBI “warning” document also reveals internal doubts. According to Fox News, FBI notations flagged gaps in the TikTok claim, stating that “a person’s address information was not a valid field when creating a TikTok account. It was unspecified how China would attain US address data from the application.” Another annotation stated that the source is available for re-contact.

The following page of the intelligence report reportedly included a directive for “SUBSTANTIVE RECALL,” dated September 25, 2020—one day after FBI Director Wray told Congress that the Bureau had seen “no coordinated voter fraud” ahead of the 2020 election. The FBI’s internal context note acknowledged that the source received the information from a sub-source who cited anonymous PRC officials. The warning section of the document repeated that the allegations were part of “an information report, not finally evaluated intelligence.” The document also stated: “Recipients should also ensure that any citation of the information in finished intelligence products draws on the SUBSTANTIVE RECALL of this report rather than the previous version.”

The document reportedly instructed all recipients to destroy all copies of the original report and remove the original report from all computer holdings, and to cite only the recall order in any future analysis. That sequence—first, a claim implicating China in voter manipulation; next, immediate questioning of the methodology; and finally, a full internal shutdown—has now become the focus of a politically and institutionally charged congressional investigation.

The remainder of the document is heavily redacted, Fox reported, and more information is being requested from the FBI as part of the Senate’s investigation. “Grassley is requesting additional documentation from the FBI to verify the production and is urging the FBI to do its due diligence to investigate why the document was recalled, who recalled it and inform the American people of its findings,” a Grassley spokesperson reportedly told Fox News.

The FBI memo’s resurfacing also casts renewed light on a broader internal struggle inside the U.S. intelligence community in 2020: whether to formally acknowledge China’s intent or actions in shaping the presidential election. At the time, DNI John Ratcliffe and a small group of dissenting officials reportedly suggested that China had taken covert steps to influence the race—particularly in opposition to Donald Trump—and that this was being downplayed or scrubbed from official analyses for political reasons. Ratcliffe’s January 7, 2021 memo to Congress directly accused senior intelligence officers of pressuring analysts to downplay or suppress these findings, especially at the CIA and ODNI. He wrote that the 2021 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) failed to fully and accurately reflect the scope of the Chinese government’s efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections.

According to Ratcliffe, internal IC investigations found that China analysts appeared reluctant to assess Chinese actions as interference because they tend to disagree with the administration’s policies. The whistleblower report from ODNI’s own Analytic Ombudsman warned of undue pressure on analysts offering alternative views and concluded that politicization existed from both above and below.

One of the officials who refused to back down was Christopher Porter, then the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber, who claims that his minority assessment on Chinese influence was effectively buried. Porter alleged in late 2024 that he was harassed and forced out of government after submitting his dissent.

In a series of posts on X applauding the decision to release the report to Grassley, Porter wrote that he was upbraided four years ago for raising similar warnings. He argued that the failure of U.S. intelligence to confront China’s espionage—particularly its hacking of critical infrastructure and telecommunications networks—would only embolden the regime. “We are now reaping the harvest of that bad decision,” he added. In another message, Porter emphasized that “politics has to stop at the water’s edge,” urging national leaders to call out Chinese influence operations “at the highest level.”

Porter went further, criticizing U.S. allies like the United Kingdom for dragging their feet on national security decisions regarding China’s penetration of telecommunications. Canada, under Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, took about three years to decide on banning Huawei. Critics such as Porter attribute such reluctance to economic motives overriding sober analysis.

Today, with the FBI’s suppressed memo in the hands of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Porter’s and Ratcliffe’s minority views are no longer isolated warnings. They are now part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that political sensitivity—especially over which party Beijing may prefer—might have played a role in sidelining national security intelligence during one of the most consequential U.S. elections in history.

By Peter Shawn Taylor

Canada’s Bee Apocalypse began in 2008. That was the year the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists (CAPA) first reported unusually high rates of winter bee colony losses. At 35 percent, the winter die-off that year was more than twice the normal 15 percent rate of attrition.

“Successive annual losses at [these] levels … are unsustainable by Canadian beekeepers,” the CAPA warned. This set off an avalanche of dire media reports that now appear on a regular basis. Among the many examples over the years: Huge Honey Bee Losses Across Canada” and “Canada’s bee colonies see worst loss in 20 years”. As each of these stories reminds readers, the disappearance of honey bees will doom our food supply, given their crucial role in pollinating crops including canola, soyabeans, apples, tomatoes and berries.

This year the black-and-yellow striped Cassandras are back at work, with headlines shouting “Scientists warn of severe honeybee losses in 2025” and “The Bees are Disappearing Again”. If it’s spring, the bees must be disappearing. Again.

It is, however, mathematically impossible for any species to be in an allegedly continuous and calamitous state of decline over nearly two decades and never actually reduce in number. For despite the steady supply of grave warnings regarding their imminent collapse, Canada’s bees are actually buzzing with life.

In 2007, according to Statistics Canada, there were 589,000 honey bee colonies in Canada,; in 2024, they reached 829,000, just shy of 2021’s all-time high of 834,000. Figuring a conservative summertime average of 50,000 bees per colony, that means there are approximately 12 billion more honey bees in Canada today than when the Bee Apocalypse first hit.

As for beekeepers, their numbers have also been growing steadily, and now stand at 15,430 – the most recorded since 1988. As CAPA’s report acknowledges, “the Canadian beekeeping industry has been resilient and able to grow, as proven by the overall increase in the number of bee colonies since 2007 despite the difficulties faced every winter.”

How is this possible? As is usually the case where there’s a need to be filled, the market holds the answer.

It is true that Canadian honey bees face a long list of threats and challenges ranging from mites and viruses to Canada’s harsh winters. It is also true that they perform a crucial service in pollinating crops, the value of which is estimated at $7 billion annually. However, this underscores the fact that bees are a livestock bred for a particular agricultural purpose, no different from cattle, chickens or pen-raised salmon. They are a business.

And in spite of its alleged status as an environmental totem, the honey bee isn’t even native to North America. It was first imported by European settlers for its honey-making abilities in the 1600s. Since then, it has been cultivated with deliberate commercial intent – allowing it to outcompete native pollinators such as bumble bees and butterflies even though it is poorly suited to the local winter. (This highlights the irony of all those native-plant pollinator gardens virtuously installed in neighbourhoods across Canada that end up supporting an invasive honey bee population.)

The significance of the bee economy means that when a beehive collapses over the winter for whatever reason, beekeepers have plenty of motivation to regenerate that colony as swiftly as possible. While hives can create their own queens over time, this can be a slow process given the cold Canadian climate. The better option is to simply buy a new queen from a warmer country.

In 2024, Canada imported 300,000 queens worth $12 million, mostly from the U.S., Italy, Australia and Chile. That works out to $40 each. In a miracle of nature, each of these new queens can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day, and each egg takes just two to three weeks to reach full maturity as a worker or drone. It is also possible to import entire “bee packages” that include a queen and 8,000 to 10,000 bees.

As a result, even a devastating 50 percent winter loss rate, something that has occurred only rarely in Canada in individual provinces and never nationally, isn’t necessarily fatal to any beekeeping operation. The beekeeper can purchase imported queens in April, split their existing colonies and be back in business by May or June.

And regardless of the honey bee’s apparent difficulties with Canada’s unforgiving weather (efforts are ongoing to breed a hardier Canadian variant), there’s no shortage of bees worldwide. Earlier this year, the German statistical agency reported the global beehive count rose from 69 million in 1990 to 102 million in 2023. Another study looking back to 1961 by New Zealand researchers found the number of honey bee colonies has “nearly doubled” over this time, while honey production has “almost tripled.” As the New Zealand report observes, “Headlines of honey bee colony losses have given an
impression of large-scale global decline of the bee population that endangers beekeeping, and that the world is on the verge of mass starvation.” Such claims, the authors note, are “somewhat inaccurate.” In truth, things have never been better for bees around the world.

Here in Canada, the ability to import queens from other countries, together with their prodigious reproductive capabilities, backstops the amazing resiliency of the bee industry. Yes, bees die. Sometimes in large numbers. But – and this is the bit the headlines always ignore – they come back. Because the market needs them to come back.

If there is a real threat to Canada’s bee population, it’s not environmental. It’s the risk that unencumbered trade in bees might somehow be disrupted by tariffs or similar bone-headed human interventions. Left on their own, bees have no problem keeping busy.

The longer, original version of this story first appeared at C2CJournal.ca