President Donald Trump just declassified a stack of documents that Washington’s permanent bureaucratic class spent years trying to keep buried.
One name buried inside those files is now getting a lot of attention — and not the kind she’d want.
Because what Trump revealed about a senior FBI official who allegedly ran a secret operation to kill a Chinese election interference report will leave you wondering who was actually in charge in 2020.
The FBI Official Who Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
Nikki Floris, then-deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, wrote in a text message that has now been declassified by Trump: “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”
That’s not a leak. That’s not speculation from a political opponent. That’s an FBI official, in her own words, describing what she was doing inside one of the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the country.
Floris was one of the key FBI officials who, in late September 2020, weeks before the election, was at the forefront of the bureau’s effort to recall and suppress an Intelligence Information Report containing information from an FBI confidential source alleging that the Chinese government was producing fake drivers’ licenses for fraudulent mail-in votes in support of then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Floris, an official within the FBI Counterintelligence Division entrusted to keep tabs on foreign interference schemes, instead immediately began retracting the tip.
And the tip itself wasn’t some fringe rumor passed along by an unreliable source.
One FBI official described the human source who provided the tip as “competent” and “authentic in his/her reporting,” with the FBI’s source confidence in their own subsource rated in the “9-10 range.”
Upon receiving the Intelligence Information Report, an FBI Albany official stated, “We have no reason to recall at this point.” Minutes later, the Albany Field Office was commanded to recall the IIR at the direct request of officials at FBI headquarters, including Nikki Floris, then-Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
But the suppression didn’t stop with one recalled report.
As she worked to retract the tip, FBI headquarters in Washington, DC informed every field office that they must transmit any foreign election interference reports to be micromanaged by Floris’s team at the FBI.
Floris told her colleagues: “We’ll get this back in a box!”
The FBI started moving toward republishing the tip, only to be overruled by Floris’ Foreign Interference Task Force, which suppressed the report again. Finally, in late October 2020, with just days to go before Election Day, a draft of the tip was deleted.
Protecting Wray, Burying the Evidence
The motive for all of this wasn’t exactly hidden once investigators dug into the emails.
The FBI’s stated reason for burying the report was because “the reporting will contradict Director Wray’s testimony.”
Some FBI officials at Washington headquarters were eager to not contradict the sworn testimony of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who had told the Senate under oath that there was no evidence of mail-in voter fraud.
Wray had said: “We have not seen historically any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it is by mail or otherwise.”
That testimony came in July 2020. The Albany field office’s report about Chinese-produced fraudulent drivers’ licenses came in August. The timeline here matters enormously.
An FBI Albany intelligence analyst summarized the disturbing chain of events: “Most concerning to me, is stating the reporting would contradict with Director Wray’s testimony. I found this troubling because it implied to me that one of the reasons we aren’t putting this out is for a political reason, which goes directly against our organization’s mission to remain apolitical and simply state what we know.”
That’s an FBI analyst raising an internal alarm about political interference — and getting ignored.
Just one day after Wray testified to Congress that he had seen no evidence of large-scale voter fraud, an August 2020 FBI field office report about Chinese authorities planning to export fraudulent drivers’ licenses to sympathizers in America was recalled in an “abnormal” way, documents declassified by the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2025 revealed.
And then there’s the Presidential Daily Brief — the intelligence summary that lands on the President’s desk every morning.
A Strategic Intelligence Analyst specializing in China, whose name has been redacted, wrote to colleagues in late November 2020: “We have deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election.”
Trump put it plainly in his primetime address. “One email among intelligence analysts admitted that they had ‘deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election.’ Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running ‘a shadow government’ to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known and to keep it away from the honorable press,” the president said.
Floris wasn’t just killing one report. She was running a gatekeeping operation on all of it.
Grassley Pushed. The FBI Stonewalled. Then Trump Declassified Everything.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released internal FBI emails revealing the FBI suppressed intelligence of alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election to insulate then-FBI Director Christopher Wray from criticism, after Wray provided inaccurate and contradictory testimony to Congress.
Grassley didn’t pull that conclusion out of thin air. He had whistleblowers.
The FBI turned over evidence of the alleged plot to Congress in June of last year. Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, subsequently released some of the emails, which revealed Floris’ role in suppressing the intelligence report.
Grassley said: “Ahead of a high-stakes election happening amid an unprecedented global pandemic, the FBI turned its back on its national security mission.”
But Floris wasn’t finished in 2020. She kept going.
In August 2020, as Senate Republicans were putting their final touches on a report about Hunter Biden’s financial connections to foreign governments, Floris and other FBI officials gave them a behind-the-scenes briefing alleging their work was “a target of Russian disinformation,” per a Senate letter.
Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson said in the letter the FBI had not provided any evidence. They said they suspected the sole purpose of the briefing was for the unsubstantiated claim to be leaked to the media. Indeed it was eventually leaked to the Washington Post.
Johnson told the paper: “Because there was no substance to the briefing … I suspected that the briefing was being given to be used at some future date for the purpose that it is now being used: to offer the biased media an opportunity to falsely accuse me of being a tool of Russia.”
Think about that sequence. Floris buried a credible tip about Chinese election interference. Then she helped smear Republican senators who were investigating Biden family corruption as Russian stooges. The media ran with the leak. And the American public never heard about any of it before they voted.
By October 2020, the Daily Caller News Foundation had confirmed that a key email on the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic. The FBI knew. The intelligence community knew. The voters didn’t.
Now consider where Floris landed after leaving the FBI. She is currently Microsoft’s Director of Insider Risk after previously serving in senior leadership at the FBI.
Floris could not be reached for comment. Her LinkedIn page has been deleted. A request for comment sent through Microsoft received no reply.
The broader intelligence picture Trump laid out in his speech makes all of this worse. The CIA confirmed the Chinese government hacked over 200 million files of voter registration data from more than a dozen states in 2020, and the FBI had raw intelligence that was buried before it could be verified about fake ballots for Joe Biden, but senior intelligence officials dampened the impact of this intelligence before it reached him in the Presidential Daily Briefing.
Senior officials in the CIA and the FBI privately expressed reluctance to elevate intelligence about Chinese hacking to Trump because he could use it to his advantage on the campaign trail, the speech and declassified documents revealed.
Let that sink in. Career intelligence officials decided the sitting President of the United States should not receive accurate intelligence because they didn’t like what he might do with it. They weren’t protecting national security. They were protecting their preferred electoral outcome.
The IC ombudsman who reviewed the spy community’s handling of Chinese versus Russian interference during 2020 concluded that intelligence analysts downplayed China’s actions because they had disdain for Trump and did not want to support his administration’s policies toward China with which they personally disagreed. That finding came from inside the intelligence community itself.
The intervention to recall the intelligence report does not appear to be an isolated incident. In the sensitive weeks after the November 2020 election, a senior analyst in the Intelligence Community admitted that the Presidential Daily Brief was being tailored to avoid mentioning election-related issues.
The same playbook the permanent Washington class used against Nixon — leak selectively, brief strategically, shape what the President sees — got deployed against Trump in 2020. The difference is that this time the target wasn’t a cover-up of a third-rate burglary. The target was intelligence about a foreign government allegedly manufacturing fraudulent ballots.
Deep Throat, the anonymous source who torpedoed Nixon by feeding the Washington Post classified information, turned out to be FBI Associate Director Mark Felt — a career bureaucrat who had been passed over for the FBI directorship and used the press as a weapon to settle a personal score. The media celebrated him as a hero. The institutional motive behind what he did was never seriously examined. Sound familiar?
The documents were declassified by Trump and described in a primetime presidential address about election security. The documents include an investigation apparently conducted last year under Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel into the unusual retraction.
Kash Patel is doing what Christopher Wray refused to do. He’s looking at what actually happened. And what’s coming out of that review is not flattering to the people who spent years insisting the 2020 election was the most secure in American history while simultaneously burying intelligence that complicated that claim.
Millions of Americans have raised serious questions about how the 2020 election was conducted — the last-minute rule changes made under cover of COVID, the private money that flooded election offices, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by Big Tech and the media in the weeks before the vote. Those questions look a lot more grounded now that the government’s own documents show intelligence analysts were “deliberately massaging” what the President received in his daily brief.
The SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, is a commonsense step to protect the integrity of American elections and ensure that only American citizens decide American elections. The documents Trump released make the case for it better than any campaign ad ever could.
And Nikki Floris, the woman who allegedly ran a shadow government inside the FBI to keep all of this quiet, is now working in the private sector managing insider risk for one of the largest technology companies on earth. Whether anyone in law enforcement ever has a serious conversation with her about what she did in September and October of 2020 remains to be seen.
Grassley put it simply: “One way or the other, intelligence must be fully investigated to determine whether it’s true, or if it’s just smoke and mirrors.”
The documents are public now. The text messages are declassified. The American people can read them at WhiteHouse.gov. The only question left is whether anyone in Washington, DC will actually be held accountable for what those documents describe.
Sources: Daily Caller, Just the News, Senate Judiciary Committee (Grassley press release and letter to FBI Director Kash Patel, June 2025), Washington Times, Epoch Times, NBC News