(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) President Donald Trump’s July 16 primetime address revealed not only that China was actively working to manipulate U.S. elections, but also that deep-state operatives within the U.S. government were engaged in covering up the election vulnerabilities.
Among the most shocking disclosures from the declassified-document dump, now available on the White House website, was the role of senior FBI counterintelligence official Nikki Floris, now a Microsoft executive, who took it upon herself to usurp the president’s authority.
“[I]’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point,” Floris told a colleague in an internal message from 2020.
NSA chief Nakasone, FBI Director Wray, “shadow government” Nikki Floris all worked against President Trump https://t.co/0DpMFAkxsn pic.twitter.com/OgBLdFn62U
— Svetlana Lokhova (@RealSLokhova) July 18, 2026
The bombshell prompted independent investigative journalist Catherine Herridge to dig in further, including communication with a senior member of former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s team.
“What they told me is that they did see a pattern where there was a sense or a feeling in the intelligence community that they just knew better,” Herridge said in an interview with NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich.
“They had to save President Trump from his own instincts, from his own tendencies, and that there was very much a globalist view and they had to preserve a globalist view,” Herridge added.
Over the past week, Catherine Herridge has been speaking directly with a senior insider on Director Tulsi Gabbard’s investigative team.
What was revealed is nothing short of treason.
Investigators believe they uncovered evidence of a deeply entrenched bureaucracy within the… pic.twitter.com/cCAgjxn5Im
— Overton (@overton_news) July 24, 2026
Herridge said that the plot extended well beyond efforts to massage Trump’s daily intelligence briefings about the election and China’s efforts to influence it.
“Whether it was downplaying or suppressing intelligence about the threat from China, whether it was giving a pass and calling the Hunter Biden laptop, ‘Russian disinformation’ … there was this level of a bureaucracy, a kind of conspiracy, that was making decisions about the kind of information that should be reaching policymakers and, ultimately, the commander-in-chief,” she said.
One particularly brazen display of unaccountability was the “spies who lie” scandal. Biden campaign officials actively colluded with 51 top-ranking members of the intel community to sow doubt about the veracity of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which implicated him and his family in a multitude of criminal activity.
Although witnesses and forensic experts quickly proved that the laptop was real, the uncertainty was enough to lend plausible deniability, helping leftist networks and social media to censor and contain the scandal.
Meanwhile, an investigation led by Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, into the contents of the laptop and the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes was tamped down by none other than Floris, who deceptively briefed the senators that the evidence they had uncovered was all part of a Russian disinformation plot to meddle in the 2020 race.
NEW: Senate Investigators seek Hunter Biden records, according to October 21 letter, addressed to team of lawyers. Deadline October 23. “According to recent reports that published emails allegedly from your client’s laptop, the Committees have identified your client as an pic.twitter.com/ChIhs14Ogq
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) October 22, 2020
In her interview with Pavlich, Herridge said the newly declassified materials allowed her to “connect the dots” in order to understand the true scope of the conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.
While it already was widely known that intel operatives had selectively withheld key details about the Biden family scandals, allowing people to jump to false conclusions, the role that Floris and her co-conspirators played in actively attempting to throw elected leaders off the trail of an investigation may be indicative of broader criminal activity.
“A defensive briefing is given by the FBI when they think that you are the target of a foreign disinformation campaign — in this case they were briefed about Russia,” Herridge said.
“And Senator Johnson told me he believes this was an effort by the FBI to discourage him and Senator Grassley from pursuing the Hunter Biden laptop,” she added. “And that this whole ‘defensive briefing’ was designed to lay the groundwork for that larger obfuscation, which was that the laptop was not credible and it was not authentic.”
Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge may have uncovered the biggest bombshell from last week’s 2020 election intelligence declassification.
According to Herridge, newly released messages from senior FBI counterintelligence official Nikki Floris help “connect the dots”… pic.twitter.com/djrzXDhqdw
— Overton (@overton_news) July 24, 2026
Speculation has swirled around ongoing Justice Department investigations into the seditious activity committed by government operatives between Trump’s 2016 election and his return to office last year. At least one of the current probes is being led by Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida.
Former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former DNI James Clapper and former Biden prosecutor Jack Smith are among those believed to be under investigation. It is unclear whether Floris or then-FBI Director Christopher Wray has yet been implicated for their actions during the 2020 campaign or thereafter.
Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
