FBI Official Retracted China Interference Tip and Cited Shadow Government
By Daily Caller News Foundation (/journals/dcnf)
“Another fucking IIR went out re election security.”
That was the response of FBI Foreign Interference Task Force Lead Nikki Floris to a tip in late September 2020 about possible Chinese election interference in the upcoming presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, according to newly declassified documents.
Floris — an official within the FBI Counterintelligence Division entrusted to keep tabs on foreign interference schemes — instead immediately began retracting the tip.
The documents were declassified by Trump and described in a primetime presidential address about election security issues Thursday night. The documents include an investigation apparently conducted last year under Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel into the unusual retraction.
“Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden,” Trump said.
“Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running a ‘shadow government’ to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known,” Trump added in apparent reference to Flores.
Trump referenced having ordered criminal investigations into certain officials, but it’s not precisely clear whether Flores is among the officials under scrutiny.
The tip alleged the Chinese government has exported thousands of drivers licenses to the U.S. to create fraudulent mail-in ballots. It had been transmitted onto the bureau’s internal servers from the Albany Field Office. It was never investigated.
Floris did not stop there. As she worked to retract the explosive tip, FBI headquarters in Washington informed every field office that they must transmit any foreign election interference reports to be micromanaged by Floris’s team at the FBI.
“We’ll get this back in a box!” she informed her colleagues.
Floris could not be reached for comment. Her LinkedIn page has been deleted. A request for comment sent through her current employer Microsoft did not receive an immediate reply.
As another FBI official prepared the bureau’s section of the Presidential Daily Brief, they asked about the tip.
“It’s been retracted,” Floris replied.
“I am basically running a shadow government inside the FBI right now,” Floris added.
“Do what you have to do :)” replied the other FBI official.
The documents shed light on a clear motive for redacting the report. Some FBI officials at Washington headquarters were eager to not contradict the sworn testimony of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who had said in sworn testimony to the Senate that there was no evidence of mail-in voter fraud in July.
“We have not seen historically any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it is by mail or otherwise,” Wray said.
“Right, but your answer is clear. You have not seen any widespread fraud by mail. It is something the FBI watches continuously to make sure that that is not happening,” asked Sen. Gary Peters, the leading Democrat on the committee.
“That is something that we would investigate seriously,” Wray said.
On the contrary, the FBI did not investigate all tips about mail-in election fraud seriously, the documents show.
‘Russian Disinformation’
About one month before Floris suppressed the report about Chinese interference in September 2020, she promoted a false narrative about Russian interference in the election.
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.
The Senate investigators — Sens. 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. It was eventually leaked to the Washington Post.
“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,” Johnson told the paper in response to the leak.
By October 2020, the Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed that a key email on the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic.
The Timeline
The documents declassified Thursday night provide a clear timeline of Floris’s quick action to retract the report and the Albany office’s effort to acquiesce to the request.
After some pushback from an official at the FBI’s criminal investigative division, who said the tip met all of the standard requirements for further investigation, a top official in Albany warned that the issue “may be elevated” and that his superiors were “aware of the interest.”
When the Albany field office quickly moved to retract the report, Floris expressed elation.
“AAAAAAAH SNAPS!!!! Well done [REDACTED] THANK YOU for handling!!!” she wrote.
Floris’s actions raise questions about the purpose of the Foreign Interference Task Force, which had been convened by Wray in the fall of 2017.
Ostensibly the report was retracted in order to conduct a new interview with the confidential human source, this time with the cooperation of FBI headquarters in Washington. The human source involved in the report, who claimed he had received it from someone in contact with the Chinese government, had made outlandish claims about Chinese-owned underground bunkers in Republican states, leading to skepticism within the bureau.
But more often officials explicitly named concern about contradicting Wray’s testimony as among the reasons to throw cold water on the raw reporting about China.
“Based on the conflict of this information to that of the wider USIC, the fact that it contradicts Director Wray’s testimony to Congress, and the importance to the current administration, I think we should … treat [the tip] like it will be going in front of the President,” one official said. “Personally, I am skeptical of this reporting based on the portions regarding COVID that veer into conspiracy theories.”
“A new 1023 will be needed,” another official wrote in reference to the form the FBI uses to interview confidential human sources. “AND it will have to run the gamut at HQ for review/approval.”
“Again, the reporting will contradict Director Wray’s testimony,” the official said.
Another official expressed concern that a tip would be suppressed simply to prevent their boss from looking back.
“My concern is that I think it gets dangerous if we cite potential political implications as reasons for not putting out our information,” the official wrote.
He noted that other agencies in the intelligence community may be able to verify whether or not the tipster’s subsource really had contact with the Chinese government.
The FBI started moving toward republishing the tip, only to be overruled by Floris’ Foreign Interference Task Force, which suppressed the report again, documents show.
Finally, in late October 2020, with just days to go before Election Day, a draft of the tip was deleted.
Correction: This article misattributed a quote to Nikki Floris in the document release. It has been updated to accurately reflect the record. We regret the error.
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All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].