Following new allegations that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manufactured fake driver’s licenses and shipped them to the United States in an attempt to influence the 2020 presidential election in favor of then-candidate Joe Biden, the Senate Judiciary Committee is now probing the matter. The FBI, under the leadership of Director Kash Patel, has declassified a sensitive document at the request of Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, which has raised significant national security concerns.
In response to the request from Grassley, Patel released a document that suggests the CCP may have planned to export fraudulent US driver’s licenses to Chinese sympathizers, enabling them to cast votes for Biden through mail-in voting. The allegations are still under investigation, and the FBI has made it clear that the information is part of raw reporting and not yet fully evaluated. It has warned that the information in the document should not be acted upon without further coordination with the FBI.
The document, which has been partly redacted, claims that the CCP produced a substantial number of fraudulent US driver licenses, intending to use them to facilitate mail-in voting for Biden. The report alleges that the CCP gathered private US user data from millions of TikTok accounts, which they used to create the fraudulent licenses. The document notes that the fraudulent licenses were intended to include real ID numbers and addresses, making them hard to detect. However, the document also raises doubts, such as the feasibility of obtaining US address data through the TikTok accounts.
The FBI has noted several inconsistencies and flagged the document for further evaluation. The bureau has recalled the document for a re-interview with the source and has requested all recipients to destroy copies and remove them from computing systems. Despite the declassification, the allegations remain unverified, and the Senate is now demanding more transparency and documentation from the FBI to fully investigate the allegations. Grassley is pushing for detailed information on the FBI’s decision to recall the document, as well as the basis for the recall and the investigative steps taken so far.
Additionally, the FBI report arrived just a month after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the International Mail Facility in Chicago O’Hare International Airport seized nearly 20,000 fraudulent driver’s licenses from various countries, including China and Hong Kong. While it’s unclear if these operations are directly related to the document’s allegations, the situation highlights the broader issue of counterfeit documentation being sent into the U.S. from overseas. The Senate’s investigation continues, with the goal of shedding light on the alleged Chinese scheme and the FBI’s role in responding to these threats.