[Salon] Documents Released in Conjunction with President Trump’s Speech

The Steady State

(PDF VERSION AVAILABLE HERE)

July 28, 2026

The Honorable Tom Cotton, Chair

The Honorable Mark Warner, Vice Chair

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

United States Senate

Washington, D.C. 20510

The Honorable Rick Crawford, Chair

The Honorable James Himes, Ranking Member

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

United States House of Representatives

Washington, D.C. 20515

The Honorable Christopher Fox

Inspector General

United States Intelligence Community

Liberty Crossing, Washington, D.C. 20511

The Honorable Peter Thomson

Inspector General

Central Intelligence Agency

Washington, D.C. 20505

Subject: Documents Released in Conjunction with President Trump’s Speech

Dear Chairman Cotton, Vice Chairman Warner, Chairman Crawford, and Ranking Member Himes,

On July 17, 2026, President Donald Trump delivered a national address from the White House – an event that has long carried the weight of the presidency. During his remarks, he denigrated American election integrity, asserting that various foreign actors had taken action to interfere with U.S. elections, and, without evidence, accused unnamed “deep state” intelligence officers of concealing intelligence supporting his claims:

Compounding the travesty, the second set of documents we are releasing reveals that members of the Deep State — a very, very famous group of people, in many cases — in our intelligence agency, worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible.

President Trump then focused on a single document, quoting from it:

The Chinese government sought to identify US journalists who had reported negatively on the US president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could and they didn’t care what they said. The Chinese government wanted the US president to lose the next election.

The document referenced by the President is Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018-2020, a partially redacted “CIA Note.” A group of experts, all members of The Steady State, have reviewed this CIA Note, and that review has raised concerns that it is not the type of CIA document that the President strongly implied it was – a professional, analytic document, using CIA “analytic tradecraft” to reach the quoted conclusions and which was then “covered up.” Our assessment, although certainly preliminary, and limited to the document as presented on the White House website, reaches findings which merit a thorough, independent, investigation by the oversight Committees, as well as the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and CIA. Our Assessment: Origin of the “Sensitive PRC Reporting 2018–2020” Note (July 22, 2026), begins with a summary:

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT

The note is probably a cherry-picked compilation based on genuine CIA raw-reporting streams, probably assembled at White House direction for the President’s speech. Agency leadership most likely bypassed CIA’s analytic directorate and tasked Directorate of Operations personnel to draft it — possibly with input from the White House Transparency Task Force — while redacting any accountable feature: no author, date, office, serial, sourcing, or agency review.

The leading alternative — a hasty but innocently intended released artifact compiled by a non-analytic office — survives on the same evidence and differs mainly in intent. What the evidence does settle is that this document existed outside normal CIA channels at every stage of its life, in contrast to the Venezuela note, its functional sibling in the same release.

The technical and administrative anomalies are one story, not two: a document with no owning office has no office workflow to digitize it, no product registration to date it, no equity holder to certify it, and no staging pipeline to stamp it — so it surfaces exactly as this one did: routed around normal review to the White House Counsel, stamped unevenly across separate passes, and scanned ad hoc into a history-free container.

The CIA Note presents a number of anomalies: they contain no identifiable office, author, scope note, serial number, sourcing methodology, production mechanism, and departs in both style and format from “typical” CIA analytic products. We urge the Committees, and the Inspectors General, to thoroughly examine these anomalies.

The integrity of the intelligence community is foundational to our democracy. When intelligence is perceived to be used to support a political narrative rather than objectively inform policymakers, its value is diminished. It is particularly dangerous when intelligence products are presented piecemeal to the American people. Confidence in the Intelligence Community is predicated not only on what it ultimately knows, but on the integrity of how its work is produced and presented. When questions arise about that process, they should not be dismissed or ignored – they should, and must, be answered.

Respectfully submitted,

Steven A. Cash

Executive Director

The Steady State

cashs@thesteadystate.org

212.685.9660

Enclosures:

  1. Assessment: Origin of the “Sensitive PRC Reporting 2018–2020” Note (July 22, 2026)

  2. CIA Note, Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018-2020 (date redacted)



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