(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Washington Post Associate Editor David Ignatius joined fellow deep-state mouthpiece Joe Scarborough and friends to push baseless claims that President Donald Trump had “fact-checked” himself by exposing China’s efforts to meddle in the 2020 election.
Ignatius made his latest appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” after publishing an opinion column in which he put his own unique spin on the massive scandal that Trump unveiled in a July 16 primetime address.
OP-ED: WaPo’s David Ignatius calls China’s theft of 220M U.S. voter files “no big deal.” Trump’s docs prove otherwise and it fits the IC’s own definition of election interference. @jsolomonReports exposes the China blind spot at the Washington Post: https://t.co/C34YiiGfXE
— Lyceum Now (@LyceumNow) July 21, 2026
“Rather than supporting Trump’s inflammatory claims about Chinese election meddling and other threats, the documents undermine many of his arguments,” Ignatius claimed in his column. “And contrary to his portrait of a diabolical ‘deep state,’ they show an intelligence community that’s almost comically cautious and bureaucratic in reaching its conclusions.”
The 58 pages of documents, in fact, revealed seditious conduct — including a top FBI official, Nikki Floris, who boasted of running a full-fledged “shadow government” out of the FBI while massaging Trump’s daily intelligence briefings to downplay the vulnerabilities of U.S. election systems to hacking and other manipulation.
Ignatius — who claimed to have “spent hours” poring over the documents while doubting that Trump actually read them — acknowledged that there was a sort of upside-down world in which fact was fiction and vice versa.
“There’s an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ aspect to this discussion,” he said.
“Foreign election interference is indeed a serious problem, and Russia has been the leading culprit,” he continued. “But Trump spent much of his first term claiming that the investigation of Russian meddling was a ‘hoax,’ and in the first months of his second term, he dismantled much of the election-security enforcement capability at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. It makes your head spin, which may be Trump’s intention”
Ignatius proceeded to claim that the newly released documents showed the intel community functioning exactly as intended by tying up top-level discussions about the need for action in bureaucratic gridlock and debate.
“For students of the intelligence process, the interagency debate is fascinating,” he said. “The analysts bounce drafts back and forth, with fussy precision.”
Ignatius’s column expectedly glossed over the damning details that undermined his thesis, while echoing an absurd talking point — originally issued by none other than Hunter Biden — that the documents actually showed Russia interfering against Joe Biden.
Putin
Last night Donald Trump released a declassified document that says his own intelligence community identified Putin as personally running an operation to defeat my father in 2020, built around a fake Burisma corruption scandal centered around me and executed through… pic.twitter.com/8Wr8lUu6yJ
— Hunter Biden (@HunterBiden) July 17, 2026
But Ignatius neglected to delve into the fact that the true enemy of the people was neither China nor Russia — though the threat of any foreign entity meddling in U.S. elections remains very real — but rather the deep state itself for pushing disinformation like the cover-up of Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal, undermining trust in the very institutions they were tasked with safeguarding.
Indeed, reporter Catherine Herridge showed that the same seditious FBI operatives whose names surfaced in the Trump document dump had openly lied to GOP senators who were investigating the Biden family’s foreign influence-peddling.
While left-wing media bias and propaganda is par for the course, though, Ignatius himself is far from a dispassionate observer. He not only took an active role in the now discredited Russia hoax that Democrats long used to cast aspersions on Trump’s legitimacy — he launched it.
It was an anonymously sourced Ignatius column that first called attention to innocent phone calls between incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Russian envoy Sergey Lavrov in December 2016.
After illegally unmasking Flynn’s identity, members of then-President Barack Obama’s inner circle met with the president on Jan. 5, 2017, to form the plot for ensnaring Flynn in an FBI perjury trap by leaking details to Ignatius.
Not long after, operatives from Hillary Clinton’s campaign team who were working in close coordination with the FBI succeeded in laundering the debunked opposition research known as the “Steele dossier” to other members of the media, after having shopped it around extensively.
Ignatius, of course, stood in vocal opposition to Trump’s appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, going on “Morning Joe” in 2024 to panic-monger about her threat to national security — aka the deep state.
Look at this
Now the CIA’s man at WaPo David Ignatius is on Morning Joe urging Trump not to pick @TulsiGabbard
David is *terrified* Tulsi will declassify who illegally leaked Gen Flynn’s name to him in 2017 pic.twitter.com/FEaKMIqUrD
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) November 18, 2024
Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
