Whistleblowers and declassified documents have revealed a pattern of the CIA and FBI soft-pedaling findings that could rattle China, raising questions about whether President Donald Trump has the best information about America’s chief geopolitical rival at a high-stakes moment for U.S.-China relations.
A soft-on-China bias during the Biden administration shaped analyses of COVID-19 and election interference at CIA, FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the evidence suggests. Many officials in the sprawling $115.5 billion intelligence apparatus ascribe to a neoliberal worldview that prefers free trade and unfettered scientific cooperation with China, whistleblowers say.
The country’s most formidable adversary may have shaped an election and ignited a pandemic that killed 1.2 million Americans without serious alarm bells ringing at the top of the U.S. intelligence community, even as Beijing grew ever more brazen in its encroachments onto American shores.
However some evidence suggests that spy world is strengthening its position vis à vis China after a series of stumbles, even as the Trump administration marshals the military for the war in Iran.
Even as the Iran War has diverted munitions from Asia, CIA Director John 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.
The bias under prior administrations was “pervasive,” according to James Erdman III, a CIA whistleblower who has risked retaliation by speaking out publicly.
Erdman revealed in Senate testimony on May 13 that when he dug into the suppression of intelligence pointing to a lab accident in Wuhan of the COVID-19 virus, many intel officials reported reluctance to elevate information that reflected poorly on Beijing. Erdman served as a member of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s task force unearthing intelligence community missteps and abuses, and remains at the CIA. The ODNI is working to declassify intelligence related to the origins of COVID before Gabbard leaves the post on June 30.
“That was pervasive among the individuals we talked to,” he said. “There’s certainly reluctance to provide information that would be geopolitically destabilizing or provide ammunition for actions that maybe they thought would be unwise.”
Virologists with the National Academy of Sciences advising the intelligence community would simultaneously work 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 through the BSEG and simultaneously worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab with ties to the People’s Liberation Army. Baric retired from UNC, Science reported on May 12.
But the CIA now says it is righting the ship.
“From day one, Director 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,” CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “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. Not only has Director Ratcliffe delivered the vital truth about COVID origins to the American people, he’s also rooted out any politicization of intelligence and held people accountable, and will continue to do so.”
Chinese Election Interference Suppressed
A whistleblower’s report on Chinese election interference in 2020 was suppressed by a senior manager at the NIC, detailed from the CIA, amid concerns it would shape Trump’s position vis-à-vis China, the whistleblower told the Daily Caller News Foundation. This whistleblower was forced to subject his report to CIA edits that watered down its central conclusion, he told the DCNF. This individual spoke with the DCNF anonymously to avoid retaliation.
Senior analysts at the CIA tend to be culturally similar in their neoliberal worldview, he said. The CIA controls the intelligence community’s internal “printing press” and can suppress intelligence reports that do not jibe with its own preferences, he added.
In a 2021 report, 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.
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.
Ratcliffe, then the 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 A. Wray’s headquarters in Washington, DC, according to internal FBI emails. 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 emails show.
The FBI field office report about Chinese authorities planning to export fraudulent driver’s licenses to sympathizers in America for the purposes of voting 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 the tip 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.
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