The U.S. intelligence community wants you to know it's getting serious about China now — after spending the better part of a decade burying every inconvenient fact about Beijing that crossed its desk. CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Congress in March that the agency has increased foreign intelligence gathering on China by 100 percent. Wonderful. Only took a global pandemic cover-up and a suppressed election interference probe to get there.
Better late than never, I suppose. Although "late" doesn't quite capture how spectacularly these agencies failed while whistleblowers screamed into the void.
The Daily Caller News Foundation laid out the full picture on Tuesday, and it's damning. Whistleblowers and declassified documents reveal a pattern of the CIA and FBI soft-pedaling findings that could rattle China — not because the intelligence wasn't there, but because the people running the show during the Obama and Biden years didn't want to hear it. A soft-on-China bias shaped analyses on everything from COVID-19 origins to Chinese election meddling, with officials at CIA, FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Intelligence Council all marinating in a neoliberal worldview that preferred free trade and "scientific cooperation" with Beijing over, you know, the truth.
Let's start with the COVID cover-up, since that one only killed a few million people. CIA senior operations officer James E. Erdman III testified before the Senate on May 13, 2026, that spy scientists repeatedly concluded a lab accident caused the COVID-19 pandemic. What happened to those conclusions? More senior bureaucrats watered them down and suppressed them. The pattern was clear: conclusions from virologists close to Anthony Fauci got promoted, while the intelligence community's own biological experts got sidelined.
It gets worse. Erdman and former DNI Tulsi Gabbard reported that the CIA denied the investigative task force access to documents, illegally surveilled its own members, and — here's the chef's kiss — fired one of its witnesses the day after the committee interviewed that witness. Nothing says "transparent government" like retaliating against the guy who just testified under oath.
Then there's the election interference angle, which Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa blew wide open. Internal FBI emails showed that the Bureau's Albany Field Office produced an Intelligence Information Report on September 25, 2020, containing information from a confidential human source alleging the Chinese government was producing "tens of thousands" of fraudulent driver's licenses to manufacture mail-in votes for Joe Biden. The FBI recalled that report one day after then-Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress that the FBI had seen no coordinated voter fraud ahead of the 2020 election.
One day. The reporting was pulled because — and this is a direct quote from the internal emails — "the reporting will contradict Director Wray's testimony." They didn't suppress it because it was wrong. They suppressed it because it was inconvenient.
The FBI then directed recipients to "destroy all copies of the original report and remove the original report from all computer holdings." For context, Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 20,000 fake U.S. driver's licenses in just the first half of 2020 at the Chicago O'Hare mail facility alone — most of them from China and Hong Kong. But sure, nothing to see here.
To his credit, Ratcliffe has taken some corrective action. The CIA withdrew 19 intelligence reports produced between 2015 and 2023 — 17 permanently deleted, two revised — after determining they fell short of impartiality standards. Ratcliffe himself said the reports "fall short of the high standards of impartiality that CIA must uphold and do not reflect the expertise for which our analysts are renowned." A senior CIA official was more blunt, admitting there was "an inappropriate insertion of DEI issues and other distractions" under prior administrations.
So now we're supposed to celebrate because the intelligence community is "pivoting to China." Pivoting from what — actively helping Beijing? These agencies didn't just miss the China threat. They buried it, shredded it, and fired the people who found it. A 100 percent increase in intelligence gathering sounds impressive until you remember they were starting from a baseline of willful blindness.
We spent years watching our spy agencies chase domestic political targets while the Chinese Communist Party ran circles around them. The pivot is welcome. The victory lap is not.
