Whistleblowers and declassified documents reveal the CIA and FBI soft-pedaled intelligence findings that could rattle China during the Biden administration — raising questions about whether the U.S. had the best information about its chief geopolitical rival at a critical moment.
The pattern shaped analyses of COVID-19 origins and election interference at the CIA, FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Intelligence Council, according to evidence compiled by whistleblowers and congressional investigators.
Many officials in the $115.5 billion intelligence apparatus subscribe to a neoliberal worldview that prefers free trade and unfettered scientific cooperation with China, whistleblowers say.
“There’s certainly reluctance to provide information that would be geopolitically destabilizing or provide ammunition for actions that maybe they thought would be unwise.”
James Erdman III, a CIA whistleblower who served on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s task force investigating intelligence community abuses, testified before the Senate on May 13 that when he investigated the suppression of lab-leak intelligence, many officials reported reluctance to elevate information reflecting poorly on Beijing.
That reluctance was “pervasive among the individuals we talked to,” Erdman said in his testimony.
Virologists with the National Academy of Sciences who advised the intelligence community worked simultaneously with Chinese scientists and were not subject to routine counterintelligence checks, according to Erdman’s written testimony.
The most striking example: University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric advised the intelligence community while simultaneously working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab with ties to the People’s Liberation Army. Baric retired from UNC in May, Science reported.
A separate whistleblower told the Daily Caller News Foundation that a report on Chinese election interference in 2020 was suppressed by a senior manager at the National Intelligence Council — detailed from the CIA — amid concerns it would shape Trump’s position on China. This whistleblower spoke anonymously to avoid retaliation.
The whistleblower was forced to subject his report to CIA edits that watered down its central conclusion, he told the DCNF.
Senior analysts at the CIA tend to share a culturally similar neoliberal worldview, the whistleblower said. The CIA controls the intelligence community’s internal “printing press” and can suppress intelligence reports that do not align with its preferences, he added.
A 2021 report from the intelligence community’s internal watchdog echoed the whistleblower’s account: Threats to the 2020 election from Russia and China were subject to inconsistent standards.
Threats from Russia were elevated and taken seriously, while threats from China were not because CIA career staff disagreed with Trump’s hawkish rhetoric, the watchdog found.
CIA 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 to be used to support those policies,” the watchdog said.
John Ratcliffe, then director of national intelligence, wrote an unclassified memo agreeing with the whistleblower and expressing concern about the politicization of intelligence on China.
At the FBI, all raw reporting about interference in the 2020 election moved through FBI Director Christopher Wray’s headquarters in Washington, DC, according to internal FBI emails obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
FBI higher-ups demanded more control over election interference reporting after the suppression of an FBI report about the possibility of thousands of Chinese-supplied driver’s licenses for the purposes of electing Joe Biden in 2020.
The FBI field office report about Chinese authorities allegedly planning to export fraudulent driver’s licenses to sympathizers in America for voting purposes was yanked in an “abnormal” way, documents declassified by the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2025 revealed.
The tip was credible: One FBI official described the human source who provided it as “competent” and “authentic in his/her reporting.”
A few months earlier, Customs and Border Protection announced it had seized 19,888 counterfeit driver’s licenses from China and Hong Kong, mostly of college-aged individuals.
Because the report had been recalled, the tip was never fully investigated, the documents show.
However, evidence suggests the intelligence community is strengthening its position on China after the series of stumbles. CIA Director Ratcliffe has stepped up efforts to recruit spies in China, including in a February video capitalizing on apparent chaos in the Chinese military.
Ratcliffe reported to Congress in March that CIA had increased foreign intelligence gathering in China by 100%.
The message about rooting out political bias has “been received within our analytic community and within the CIA,” he said.
CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Ratcliffe has been “committed to setting the record straight on the origins of COVID-19 and ending what he observed as DNI—the politicization of intelligence on COVID-19’s origins in China.”
“In his first week as director, he declassified and released CIA’s updated assessment, which confirmed what intelligence, science, and commonsense had indicated for so long—that the likely cause of the pandemic was a lab-leak by China,” Lyons said.
The FBI said in a statement to the DCNF: “This FBI remains committed to detecting and countering foreign interference efforts by adversarial nations. Our Counter Espionage Division and field offices work together to defend the homeland against all foreign interference efforts, including any attempts at election interference.”
The ODNI is working to declassify intelligence related to the origins of COVID before Gabbard leaves the post on June 30.
