by Monica Showalter
We've seen a parade of deep staters over the years, everyone from the FBI lovebirds, Peter Strozk & Lisa Page; to the Brookings Institute's impeachment crew led by Fiona Hill; to the hideous FBI and Justice Department officials Who Got Away With It -- looking at you, Kevin Clinesmith, and you, too, Bruce & Nellie Ohr; to CIA presidential briefing officer Amy McFadden who famously cheered Hamas; to the spies at the heart of the impeachment plot, colluding with Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, e.g., Eric Ciaramella. All of them did their part to undermine the first Trump presidency.
But the surface has been barely scratched, and these characters were in fact low-hanging fruit. The higher (or deeper) tentacles of the deep state were revealed by President Trump in his address to the nation this week, the speech the media refused to run.
One of them ran the Foreign Influence Task Force and had bona fide intelligence on actual Chinese operations to manipulate vote counts in the 2020 election, which President Trump (and many others) believe had been stolen, hiding that information from the intelligence community's only client, the President of the United States -- because she didn't like his politics.
Her name was FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism, Nikki Floris; her bios are here and here, and Trump laid out the goods on her in a trove of her bons mots in documents on the White House site. The rest of her story is a doozy.
“I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point,” she messaged to her unnamed colleagues.
I can't tell if they were peers, superiors, or subordinates, or people outside the agency. No matter who it was, to say that one is running a 'shadow government' sounds both megaomaniac -- and illegal.
Another unnamed analyst in the White House release was even more specific about the plot going on:
“We have deliberately massaged our one pending [President’s Daily Brief] to avoid any direct links to the election.”
That may have been Floris, or someone under her, the former of whom testified to Congress in 2019 that there was no foreign tampering of the vote that she knew of in the 2018 elections, while leaving the gate open to 'influence' and 'confidence in election issues' which creates a wide and subjective berth for suppressing dissidents.
I found the transcript of an Oct. 22, 2019 exchange Floris had with Rep. Ben Cline, a Virginia Republican, here:
I want to go ahead and ask Ms. Floris, in your testimony, you say that we do know that our adversaries are actively trying to influence public opinion and electoral processes in advance of the 2020 election. You have mentioned in your testimony influencing public opinion through various social media activity.
What electoral processes, what efforts to interfere with electoral processes are you aware of at this time?
Ms. Floris. So, sir, thank you for the question. As we roll into 2020, the one thing I want to highlight is that countries like Russia and China, they pose a pervasive and persistent threat. It is not just based on the electoral cycle. Their foreign influence operations are essentially always present. When it comes to the electoral process, you could look at something as voter suppression. The whole concept of pushing out false information, of highlighting places to vote that are actually not true, this whole concept of disinformation that we have really seen the Russians focus on, that, in and of itself, can interfere with the electoral process.
Mr. Cline. Okay. Nothing to the extent of actively trying to hack into or interfere with the electoral system?
Ms. Floris. To date, sir, we have not seen anything specific regarding hacking into the electoral systems of the 2020 election.
But actually, she would see something specific after the testimony (and possibly before).
The Oversight Project reports in this extended thread here that she had a specific report out of the Albany field office that the Chinese government had actively attempted to secure ballots. The news came out in September 2020. It's not known how long the information had been known internally:
So she centralized all the reports to herself, and then kept those reports from the president. What kind of public servant is that?
Catherine Herridge has lots of illuminating material, too:
Oh and she had lots more on her plate: She was behind the FBI censorship of conservatives at Twitter, and on other social media, as the Oversight Project thread notes, she worked with falsely appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith and his Arctic Frost impeachment of Trump. She also participated in something called 'Round River' in August 2020, shortly before her testimony, to smear informants who knew of Joe Biden's corrupt business activities, as Russian agents.
How did she justify the latter in her own mind?
Ms. Floris. Thank you, ma'am, for the question. The FBI becomes interested in foreign influence activity, again, when it hits those four categories I spoke about in the beginning: The subversive nature of it, the undeclared nature of it, the coercive and criminal nature of it. The FBI will respond as we do in any investigation with the full might of not only the Foreign Influence Task Force, but the, you know, hundreds of agents and analysts out in all our 56 field offices who are working the foreign influence threat day in and day out. We will use all the tools we have in our toolbox as we do--
I wonder how she defines 'subversive nature'? Seems there's a lot of wiggle room in that term. Does she mean President Trump? You know, the old 'threat to democracy' and all that?
Meanwhile, Miranda Devine pointed out that she was involved in this:
The extent of the damage she did by refusing to do her job is widespread, and who knows how many people she influenced?
She seems to know she's in trouble now, her LinkedIn page is blank, but not deleted, which may be a way of getting around the Wayback Machine, but I found some elements of her now blanked-out LinkedIn account, describing her current job as Microsoft's Director of Insider Risk, in a Google AI search:
It seems the basic task of any intelligence or counterintelligence officer is to communicate one's findings to the right people, not muck around in domestic politics and conceal vital information from the president. What harm would it have done to pass on news of Chinese electoral shenanigans to the president? Wouldn't he have a need to know? Wasn't this information acquired at great cost to U.S. taxpayers who paid for it? Why didn't she pass it on? Something corrupted her, turned her into a deep state operative looking to undermine the president instead of a neutral conveyor of reliable information. Perhaps it was a desire to please FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was himself trying to undermine the president, and so, get promotions, or, maybe she had an inferiority complex, having only gone to mediocre schools compared to others in her social circles. Or maybe she was a rationalizer, drunk on her own power, as her note above suggests. I don't know.
But she seems singularly unfit for any position of trust in any position that requires principles, which she clearly demonstrated, at least in these cases, that she didn't have. Maybe they all need a refresher course on public integrity in that agency.
