After President Donald Trump’s disruptive primetime speech to the nation on July 16, he revealed that his administration had evidence that federal intelligence officials withheld intelligence about China’s involvement in election tampering in the U.S. For a U.S. president to make such a claim, he’d better have the receipts, and the president promised that he did.
MAJOR BREAKING: President Trump says 220 million U.S. voter files were stolen by the People’s Republic of China and says the intelligence was deliberately covered up by deep state actors within the U.S. government. pic.twitter.com/nUGGnVoNeJ
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 17, 2026
Now, reports are that Nikki Floris, a former FBI analyst and senior leader who was charged with oversight of election security in 2020, once wrote that she was “basically running a shadow government across the FBI.” This in the context of a report that now alleges that China was behind the manufacture of fake driver’s licenses as part of a massive, subversive mail-in ballot system.
The president mentioned this “shadow government” in his remarks, alleging that federal officials hid from his administration intelligence tied to China’s election interference operations. While Trump did not specifically mention Floris in his speech, newly declassified FBI messages peg Floris as the originator of the “shadow government” term in this context. In his speech, Trump was not being hyperbolic. He drew his phrasing directly from the documents that back up his claims.
One email among intelligence analysts admitted that they had, quote, 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, quote, a shadow government, unquote, to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known, Trump said.
🚨DECLASSIFIED:
— Cam Higby 🇺🇸 (@camhigby) July 17, 2026
2020 Chat logs reveal FBI agents discussing recalling an intelligence report on China from the Presidential briefing. One agent says they are “RUNNING A SHADOW GOVERNMENT” pic.twitter.com/JRJoFXIz35
This online chat happened on Sept. 25, 2020, and it reveals that a report, called an Intelligence Information Report (IIR), on possible Chinese election interference was recalled.
A group called The Oversight Project has reported that Floris received the report from the FBI’s Albany field office, but it isn’t clear how long the FBI knew about the alleged Chinese activity. It did indicate that the Chinese method was to use TikTok data it stole to create those fake driver’s licenses and fraudulent Biden ballots.
Within minutes of the Albany field office releasing the report, it appears FBI headquarters recalled it.
One day before this, on Sept. 24, FBI Director Christopher Wray appeared before the U.S. Senate and told them that his FBI had “not seen... any kind of coordinated national voter fraud.”
That next day, on Sept. 25, Floris asked if the report from Albany was revised and then indicated that the FBI was about to direct all field offices to route election-specific reports through FBI headquarters and its Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF). Why? What did FBI leadership know, and when did it know it?
At the time, Floris was a deputy assistant director in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. She was the FBI’s election security lead for the 2020 presidential election.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), before the president’s most recent national address, did his own due diligence on this matter. Grassley chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, which confirmed that Floris was one of those involved in requesting the IIR be recalled. This then prevented FBI field offices and other federal intelligence agencies from seeing the report.
The Washington Examiner reported that, “According to Grassley, the FBI’s stated reason for recalling the report was concern that its contents would contradict then-FBI Director Christopher Wray’s congressional testimony.”
Veteran investigative reporter Catherine Herridge has further added intrigue to this story by reporting that not only was Floris implicated in this IIR controversy, but that she may have had a hand in how the Hunter Biden laptop story played out in the run-up to the 2020 election.
CONNECTING THE DOTS: SUPPRESSION CHINA INTELLIGENCE 2020 ELECTION
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) July 18, 2026
FBI Deputy Assistant Director (DAG) Counterintelligence
Floris writes, “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point”
Hunter Biden Laptop: August 2020@SenRonJohnson confirms that… pic.twitter.com/MiwHb0OCKo
As to that IIR report, the Washington Examiner reported that an FBI analyst in Albany had “objected internally to the decision (to recall the report), saying the concern about political implications was troubling and inconsistent with the bureau’s responsibility to remain apolitical.”
Prior to 2020, Floris came before the House Judiciary Committee in October 2019, where she stated that both Russia and China represented “pervasive and persistent threat” to America.
This is wild. The former FBI official, Nikki Floris, who wrote in an email that she was “basically running a shadow government across the FBI,” testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee in October of 2019 on…. wait for it….
— TheStormHasArrived (@TheStormRedux) July 18, 2026
ELECTION SECURITY! You can’t make this… pic.twitter.com/74zPbwwM0x
In this clip, you can see that Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) asks Floris specifically what she’s seen in terms of foreign interference in American elections. Floris’s response: “To date, sir, we have not seen anything specific regarding hacking into the electoral systems of the 2020 elections.”
One thing to note here is something I've pointed out in other recent articles about what to look for when a leftist makes a denial. There's a specificity to her response that is a red flag to what she's not talking about, the dog that's not barking. She denies knowing "anything specific regarding hacking into the electoral systems," but she avoids any mention of other means China and Russia might use to interfere with our elections, such as, for example, printing fake ballots and making fake driver's licenses.
While this appearance before Congress happened roughly a year before that IIR report, we all know Chinese operatives didn’t just wake up one day in 2020 and start trying to interfere with American elections. If we were to take Floris at her word in 2019, then she and the FBI had to be well aware of the serious election interference threats posed by both China and Russia and how they operated in advance.
What we don’t yet know is why. Why did Floris and company decide to withhold that report? How many other similar reports and documents were withheld from the first Trump administration? Who directed these things to happen?
In 2022, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray tapped Floris to serve as an intelligence analyst in the Washington Field Office’s Intelligence Division. When Kash Patel took over at the FBI, he sent Floris packing in May 2025. At the moment, she’s a senior manager at Microsoft, where she’s in charge of “insider risk,” according to the Washington Examiner.
When the president gave his address on July 16, he knew he was opening a Pandora’s box. He also knew that the legacy media and so many other powerful forces would work to suppress reporting and information on all of this.
But at the same time, Trump has given us threads to pull, and once we pull at each one, the whole scheme starts to unravel before our eyes. The legacy media and the left were able to put a tyrannical lid on all of the shenanigans around the 2020 election to this point. They moved in lockstep, not allowing any daylight to expose what really was happening at the time.
Finally, we’re getting something to work with. We can’t let the left marginalize this now. We can’t let the legacy media frame this as just more “conspiracy theories” as though the very word “conspiracy” is equated with “falsehood.” These things are real, and they are serious. Because we have the truth on our side, it’s up to us to never let this go until the legacy media and the left are forced to face a reckoning they’ve long been trying to avoid. The time has come.
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