Contained in the reams of documents declassified by President Donald Trump this month and obtained by Just the News 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.

President Trump in a speech on Thursday decried the effort by some intelligence officials to hide efforts by China to gather data ahead of the 2020 election, and according to the assessment of some officials, interfere in the election. 

“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 and reviewed by Just the News.   

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 (IIR) 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. 

The FBI turned over evidence of the alleged plot to Congress in June of last year. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, subsequently released some of the emails, which revealed Floris’ role in suppressing the intelligence report. 

The bureau appeared, based on the emails, afraid it would undercut then-FBI Director Christopher Wray’s assurances to Congress that foreign meddling did not pose a threat to the presidential race, Just the News previously reported. 

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. 

“We have deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election,” a Strategic Intelligence Analyst specializing in China, whose name has been redacted, wrote to colleagues in late November 2020. 

This “boggled” the minds of officials at the National Intelligence Council, email communications among the declassified records show. 

“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 at the National Intelligence Council. 

“This is a really good example, but far from the only one, of what I've been raising since the summer-that the IC is deliberately avoiding mentioning a connection to elections for non-substantive reasons,” the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber wrote. 

These communications were contained in a batch of hundreds of pages of documents Trump declassified and released to the public Thursday night, in a prime time White House speech. In a primetime speech from the White House, Trump laid out evidence that the Intelligence Community had detected China’s massive sweep of voter registration data beginning in 2020. 

By 2023, the memos show, Beijing had obtained more than 220 million voter records in the United States.

Just the News previously reported that the Intelligence Community knew that the Chinese had gained access to American voter registration data since 2020, but had kept the scope secret. Not until Thursday did Americans know just how many voter files China had obtained. 

An overlooked memo declassified by the Biden administration in 2022—two years after it was written—aluded to the intrusions, though the report was heavily redacted. 

“[Redacted] Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple U.S. states' [Redacted] election voter registration data, [Redacted] to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election,” stated a once highly classified April 2020 National Intelligence Council memo entitled "Cyber Operations Enabling Expansive Authoritarianism."  

Just the News also previously reported that some Intelligence Community officials believed analysts had worked to conceal the evidence of the Chinese efforts because they opposed President Trump’s policies. 

"We knew by April 2020 that Chinese intelligence had voter registration data from multiple states and was analyzing it with an eye toward the 2020 election," former National Intelligence Council officer Christopher Porter told Just the News in March. "But CIA blocked efforts to inform President Trump and later stopped many of these reports from being made available to Congress."

"During the Biden administration, when I raised concern about the legal requirement to share these and other reports with Congressional oversight, they changed my job to exclude me from elections and then fired me," he said.

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 with which they “personally disagree.”