Documents posted by the White House Thursday night featured an internal F.B.I. memo made public more than a year ago, written in the run-up to the 2020 election and immediately met with skepticism from senior intelligence agents, suggesting that China planned to use fake IDs to meddle in the election.
The September 2020 memo from an agent in the F.B.I.’s Albany, N.Y., field office described a claim by a source that China had hatched a plan to send thousands of fraudulent driver’s licenses to the United States, ostensibly for the purpose of casting ballots.
According to the source, “China planned to use the fraudulent drivers licenses to account for tens of thousands of mail-in votes,” the document said.
President Trump seemed to refer to the memo in his prime-time speech on Thursday night, though his description of the original allegation was sharply at odds with what the document said.
“Raw intelligence obtained by the F.B.I. in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that Chinese activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden,” the president said.
The memo and other F.B.I. documents about it were released last year by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Mr. Grassley and others have cited the Albany memo as evidence that F.B.I. leaders covered up evidence that China might be taking aggressive steps to interfere with the U.S. election results in 2020, because admitting it might contradict prior testimony to Congress from then-F.B.I. director Christopher Wray, a frequent target of President Trump’s wrath.
But the documents released last year show that the memo, which was never meant to be released publicly, touched off an internal debate not just over whether the new information contradicted the director’s testimony, but whether the source’s information was reliable and worth sharing throughout the F.B.I.
After the memo was put into the F.B.I. computer system, senior officials ordered it to be withdrawn while more investigative work was done. Some in the Albany field office chafed at that command, arguing the memo was like many others in the bureau’s internal computer system: a raw, unvetted intelligence tip meant to be shared among experts in case it corresponded with other information.
But more senior agents questioned whether the source, who was new, was getting good information or random, erroneous gossip.
One F.B.I. official noted that the source did not have firsthand knowledge, but had gotten the tip from a “sub-source.” .
The same official expressed concerns that the source had also passed along an unusual tip about secret Chinese-run locations in the United States spreading Covid to Americans, noting that it sounded far-fetched and thus called into question the source’s reliability.
Other agents expressed a simpler reason to doubt the memo’s claims. Most fake IDs, they noted, were not bought or sold as part of an elaborate geopolitical scheme to affect a national election, but to allow underage teenagers to buy alcohol.
