Declassified documents show 'shadow government' in action to suppress China threat to elections

Contained in the reams of documents declassified by President Donald Trump this month is compelling evidence that the oft-decried 'deep state' is not only real but is, in fact, activated to obscure the scope of Chinese hacks of voter data to hide them from then-President Donald Trump.

'I'm basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point,' said Nikki Floris, then-deputy assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, in a text message declassified by Trump. Floris was one of the key FBI officials who on September 25, 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.

'We have deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election,' a Strategic Intelligence Analyst specializing in China wrote to colleagues in late November 2020. 'Small update from NSA below. Their PDB isn't going to tie to the election? The mind boggles,' wrote the director of Election Threat Analysis. These communications were contained in a batch of more than 800 pages of documents Trump declassified. By 2023, the memos show, Beijing had obtained more than 220 million voter records in the United States.

Intelligence Community analytic ombudsman Barry Zulauf, who conducted a review of the spy community's handling of Russian versus Chinese meddling efforts during the 2020 election, concluded that intelligence analysts downplayed China's actions because they had disdain for the 'vulgarian' Trump and did not want to support the policies and priorities of the Trump administration toward China. Former National Intelligence Council officer Christopher Porter said: 'CIA blocked efforts to inform President Trump and later stopped many of these reports from being made available to Congress.'