Election Crime Bureau

Made possible by the Lindell Offense Fund

Foreign Interference

Foreign interference in the administration of the 2020 United States General Election encompasses four distinct but interrelated categories of concern: Remote Access, Supply Chain, Fraudulent Records, and Influence Operations. The evidentiary record is not speculative on the question of state‑sponsored activity; rather, it establishes multiple real pathways through which foreign actors could access, shape, or conceal activity within U.S. election systems. This section documents findings across all four subtopics that, taken together, demonstrate the existence of concrete avenues for foreign exploitation of U.S. election infrastructure. These pathways are real, documented, and in multiple instances traversed by unknown or unattributed actors during the election period. The institutional response — including the suppression of intelligence findings, the curtailment of investigative leads, and the destruction or non‑retention of forensic log files that would have enabled post‑hoc verification — has severely hampered subsequent investigations; this obstruction is itself a material finding.

Topic Analysis

Foreign Interference Findings

The machines contained Chinese components. The data center ran on Huawei. The code was maintained in Serbia. The poll-worker files lived on a server in Beijing. The CIA analysts declined to report Chinese interference — in writing, on the record, for political reasons. Iran was charged. The E.O. 13848 sanctions trigger was never pulled. By every measurable layer of the system, a foreign adversary had a path in — and the intelligence architecture built to close that path was deliberately left open.

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Subtopics