US President Donald Trump on Thursday accused officials from the Obama-era intelligence establishment of concealing evidence of alleged Chinese interference aimed at undermining his administration and helping Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. He also claimed that documents linked to former President Barack Obama had also been found among material that was supposed to be destroyed.Trump made the allegations during a primetime address, saying recently discovered burn bags contained information provided by “President Barack Hussein Obama” that was meant to be incinerated but was never destroyed. He said the discovery raised serious questions, although he attributed the failure to destroy the material to incompetence rather than deliberate action.“Recently, we found significant numbers of burn bags, information given by President Barack Hussein Obama to be burned. These bags were supposed to be incinerated, but it never happened. We believe this was not done purposely, but rather through incompetence. But the findings are stunning,” Trump said.The US president also alleged that intelligence officials had hidden information about efforts to prevent his re-election and support Biden’s electoral prospects. He said raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, but allegedly buried by officials, indicated that China had attempted to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.Trump further claimed that CIA and NSA reports on alleged foreign efforts targeting his re-election were deliberately kept out of the Presidential Daily Briefing during his presidency. According to him, one intelligence analyst admitted that the briefing had been “deliberately massaged” to keep information about Chinese activities linked to the election from reaching the president.Another FBI official, Trump claimed, wrote that she was running “a shadow government” to keep intelligence about alleged election interference from becoming public.The allegations formed part of Trump’s broader accusation that officials within the intelligence agencies had worked to protect the political interests of those opposed to him while concealing information from both the president and Congress.Trump said CIA reporting from 2018 described efforts to use forces opposed to him to reduce his vote share and prevent his re-election. He also cited a 2019 assessment that alleged China sought to undermine confidence in the US president and influence American business leaders and journalists against him.“The Chinese government wanted the US president to lose the next election,” Trump quoted the intelligence reporting as saying.Trump said the alleged concealment was particularly serious because intelligence agencies had reportedly learned in 2020 that voter registration data involving tens of millions of voters across 18 states had been bought, stolen or hacked by China. He claimed the information was not disclosed to him as president and, “to the best of our knowledge”, was not shared with Congress.Instead, Trump said, officials continued to describe the 2020 election as “the most secure election in the history of our country”.Trump said the documents contained “exact quotes from CIA reporting”, although he added that the identity of the person responsible for one of the quoted assessments remained under review.He has now asked the office of the director of national intelligence, the US department of justice, the FBI and the CIA to investigate how the information was allegedly withheld, fire those involved in the purported cover-up and pursue criminal charges where appropriate.
