Chad Wolf, Donald Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, interfered with a report on Russian interference in the 2020 election by demanding changes, delaying its dissemination and creating a risk the report might be seen as politicised, a government watchdog said.
Eventually declassified in March 2021, the report was a summary of foreign election interference into the 2020 election. It found that, as one headline put it, “Russia tried to help Trump in 2020, Iran tried to hurt him and China stayed out of it”.
But before it was released, and two months before the election, an analyst in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) complained that Wolf, as well as his predecessor Kirstjen Nielsen and the deputy secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, had interfered with the report.
According to the whistleblower, in mid-May 2020 Wolf instructed him “to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran”.
The analyst also said that in July 2020 he was ordered to delay the report because it “made the president look bad”.
At the time, a DHS spokesman “flatly denied” the claim.
On Tuesday, the office of the DHS inspector general released its own report. It found that DHS “did not adequately follow its internal processes and comply with applicable intelligence community policy standards and requirements when editing and disseminating an Office of Intelligence and...
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