The FBI told America the 2020 election was the most secure in history.
Now declassified documents show an FBI agent was running something else entirely.
And Catherine Herridge just exposed what that agent wrote in her own words.
Declassified FBI Documents Show How Officials Altered the President's Daily Brief on China
On November 20, 2020, a Strategic Intelligence Analyst specializing in China and North Korea assessments sent an email that should have ended careers on the spot.
Intelligence officials had deliberately altered a pending President's Daily Brief to remove any references linking China's activities to the 2020 election.
Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge reviewed those declassified materials on Katie Pavlich Tonight on NewsNation and found them consistent with earlier whistleblower accounts – that China's all-fronts campaign to defeat Trump and steal the election had been systematically buried before it ever reached the Oval Office.
A senior member of Tulsi Gabbard's Director's Initiatives Group, known as the DIG, told Herridge directly what the investigation uncovered.
The pattern was a deep institutional belief that intelligence community officials simply knew better than the President – and that a globalist worldview had to be preserved at the expense of accurate intelligence reaching the commander-in-chief.
China threat assessments never reached the Oval Office.
The Hunter Biden laptop got labeled Russian disinformation – no proof required.
Bureaucrats decided what a sitting president could and could not know.
Herridge described it as "a kind of conspiracy" operating at the highest levels of the permanent bureaucracy.
Gabbard's DIG didn't stop at election interference – the unit spent months digging into COVID origins, Crossfire Hurricane, Havana Syndrome, and how the federal government surveilled its own citizens.
What investigators found across every single inquiry was the same thing: a permanent class of bureaucrats who decided the intelligence products of the United States government belonged to them – not to the elected officials sworn to protect the country.
FBI Agent Nikki Floris Ran a Shadow Government to Hide China Election Interference
In late September 2020, the FBI's Albany Field Office transmitted a tip through proper channels: the Chinese government had exported thousands of U.S. driver's licenses to manufacture fraudulent mail-in ballots for Joe Biden.
Nikki Floris was the FBI's Foreign Interference Task Force Lead – the exact official whose job was to investigate that kind of threat.
She buried it instead.
Within hours, Floris moved to retract the tip before any investigation could begin.
When the Albany office complied, she responded in writing: "AAAAAAAH SNAPS!!!! Well done [REDACTED] THANK YOU for handling!!!"
That's an FBI counterintelligence official celebrating the destruction of a China election interference report five weeks before Election Day.
Declassified messages show Floris wrote that she was "basically running a shadow government across the FBI."
The evidence backs her up.
In August 2020, Floris briefed Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, telling them their Hunter Biden investigation was a target of Russian disinformation – with zero supporting evidence, according to a Senate letter the senators sent calling out the FBI's claim.
In October 2019, she testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the subject of election security.
Nikki Floris now works as an executive at Microsoft.
Her LinkedIn page has since been deleted.
She has not been arrested.
Trump released these documents during a primetime national address on July 16, calling it "raw intelligence… buried by rogue bureaucrats" inside the FBI.
Former National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien confirmed he had raised alarms about Chinese election interference years earlier – and been dismissed by the same press that is now ignoring this story entirely.
The DIG didn't uncover an isolated bad actor.
It found a repeating pattern – the same institutional filter applied to COVID origins, Crossfire Hurricane, Havana Syndrome, and Trump's own daily intelligence briefings across his entire first term.
One bureaucrat suppressing one tip is a crime.
A coordinated operation spanning the CIA, FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence across two election cycles is a different category of threat entirely.
Nobody should still be debating whether the deep state was real during Trump's first term.
Nikki Floris answered that in her own text message.
The only question left is whether Kash Patel's investigation into the 2020 suppression ends with someone in handcuffs – or just another LinkedIn page quietly deleted.
Sources:
- Staff, "Meet The Rogue FBI Bureaucrat Who Said She Ran A Shadow Government," Daily Caller, July 17, 2026.
- Staff, "Who Is Nikki Floris? Ex-FBI Official Behind Trump's Shadow Government Rhetoric During Election Address," Washington Examiner, July 20, 2026.
- Staff, "What They Are Saying: President Trump Exposes Bombshell Evidence of Foreign Election Interference and Deep State Suppression," White House, July 16, 2026.
- Staff, "Herridge: Declassified Docs Show Intel Officials Were Working Against Trump Ahead of 2020 Election," BizPac Review, July 18, 2026.
- Staff, "Not Yet Arrested: Nikki Floris, Who Ran a Shadow Government Across the FBI, Now Works at Microsoft," World Tribune, July 21, 2026.
