What our spies cut out of the China file

By Peter Navarro | Washington Examiner | August 17, 2026

Two facts now sit in plain sight in the declassified record. Communist China entered the 2020 election with an integrated arsenal capable of shaping an American presidential contest. And officials inside our own intelligence community worked, in their own written words, to strip that intelligence of its election relevance, fragment it, delay it, and in one case recall it outright.

Much of the American press answers with a non sequitur: There is no conclusive proof Beijing altered vote totals in 2020. That may well be true, but it is beside the point.

The story is not that China declined to fire every weapon it built. It is that China built them, still holds them, and can deploy them in an election less than three months from now.

Start with the arsenal. A CIA World Intelligence Review published July 1, 2020, jointly with the FBI and the National Security Agency, reported Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors spear-phishing a U.S. presidential campaign and collecting election-related information from voter databases, a polling firm, and political organizations.

That same summer, Beijing’s planners were mapping the recession, COVID-19, racial conflict, policing, immigration, and partisan division as American vulnerabilities to exploit — with themes questioning President Donald Trump’s fitness to govern and undermining the legitimacy of his presidency.

Beijing, in other words, was inside one campaign’s email while building a playbook against the other. That is not a preference. It is a posture: collect on everyone, build everything, decide later.

The same CIA memo assessed that Beijing “does not currently intend to covertly interfere or try to sway the outcome of the election.” That sentence is the whole case. Our intelligence services watched an adversary penetrate a presidential campaign and harvest voter data, then reported that Beijing had not yet decided to use any of it.

Intent is a decision. Capability is what remains after the decision changes.