Nothing says "we trust democracy" quite like a bunch of intelligence officials deciding they know better than the actual President of the United States. Catherine Herridge, the veteran investigative journalist, dropped some bombshells during a NewsNation appearance that paint a picture of bureaucrats playing gatekeeper with classified information meant for the Commander in Chief.
So here is the gist. A senior member of Tulsi Gabbard's Director's Initiatives Group, lovingly abbreviated as the DIG, told Herridge that intel community officials operated under a cozy little belief system. They thought their job was to protect a "globalist perspective" by cherry picking what information actually made it to policymakers, including Donald Trump. Because apparently the President's Daily Brief comes with an editorial board now.
This all ties into freshly declassified documents from 2020 about China's election influence operations. Trump released these records in connection with a primetime address the prior week, and they contained some real gems. One email from November 20, 2020, written by a Strategic Intelligence Analyst working on China and North Korea assessments, straight up admitted that officials had "deliberately massaged" a pending Presidential Daily Brief to scrub any direct connections to the election. Just casually admitting to sanitizing intelligence for the leader of the free world. No big deal.
Herridge said she reviewed the materials herself and found they lined up with earlier whistleblower claims that intelligence regarding China's multi pronged efforts to undermine Trump's reelection had been suppressed or doctored. Her source within Gabbard's team described a culture where officials believed they needed to "save President Trump from his own instincts." How generous of them.
The pattern apparently went beyond just China intel. According to Herridge's reporting, this same mentality extended to dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, and the DIG found it stretched across investigations into COVID origins, Crossfire Hurricane, Havana Syndrome, and domestic surveillance practices. Basically, if there was a sensitive topic, someone was playing traffic cop with the information.
There is more. Herridge also brought up Nikki Floris, a senior FBI official handling counterintelligence on foreign interference. Instant messages attributed to Floris revealed internal FBI dynamics that were, shall we say, illuminating. Senator Ron Johnson confirmed to Herridge that Floris gave him and Senator Chuck Grassley a defensive briefing in August 2020 about potential Russian disinformation, which Johnson interpreted as connected to Hunter Biden laptop inquiries.
Some intelligence assessments even had handwritten notes and track changes referencing concerns that certain information could help Trump's reelection campaign. Reports on China's influence operations were either kept out of the Presidential Daily Brief entirely or had their confidence levels quietly adjusted. Independent cybersecurity reviews from that era, since declassified, showed increased Chinese activity targeting U.S. elections, but formal documentation by agencies including the CIA under Director Gina Haspel was reportedly limited.
So to recap, unelected bureaucrats decided they were smarter than elected leadership and filtered intelligence accordingly. Welcome to the most transparent government on Earth, folks.
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