During the 2020 campaign, Donald Trump warned anyone who would listen that China knew things about the Biden family’s business dealings — that Beijing had leverage over Joe Biden, that he was compromised, that putting him in the White House was a national security risk. The legacy media called it a conspiracy theory. Social media platforms censored it. The intelligence community buried the underlying evidence and watched in silence while voters went to the polls.
Emmy-winning investigative journalist Catherine Herridge just found government records confirming it wasn’t a conspiracy theory. It was true.
Digging through newly declassified material tied to China’s 2020 election influence operation — material that was sitting in plain sight for anyone willing to spend a couple of hours looking — Herridge found records explicitly referencing Chinese blackmail efforts targeting the Biden family. The records were tied to the President’s Daily Brief. “I found these records which are talking about blackmail by China,” Herridge told Katie Pavlich on NewsNation. “It was for President Biden’s daily brief. I can conclude, I think, that it was probably about targeting his family.”
A couple of hours. That’s all it took. Nobody in the mainstream media bothered.
“I think in the media or legacy media, there was kind of a willful blindness,” Herridge said. “They didn’t want to look at the records.”
This is the most polite possible description of what actually happened. The New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 — with documented evidence of the Biden family’s financial entanglements with Chinese Communist Party-linked companies. Fifty-one intelligence officials signed a letter calling it Russian disinformation. Twitter and Facebook suppressed it. Network television ignored it. And the FBI, which had the laptop since December 2019, said nothing while the election proceeded.
Herridge’s new findings don’t exist in isolation. They land one week after Trump’s primetime address revealed that China compromised 220 million American voter files, that CIA analysts deliberately softened their assessments of Chinese election interference, and that an FBI counterintelligence official named Nikki Floris described herself as running a “shadow government” specifically to shield certain intelligence from the White House.
Herridge connected those dots too. In August 2020, Floris gave Senators Johnson and Grassley a “defensive briefing” ostensibly about Russia. Johnson believes it was designed to steer them away from the Hunter Biden laptop story and establish a framework for calling it disinformation before it could damage the election.
The picture that emerges is coherent and damning. China acquired leverage over the Biden family through their documented financial entanglements with CEFC and other CCP-linked entities. That leverage was flagged in intelligence assessments. Those assessments were buried, softened, or suppressed by career officials who apparently decided voters didn’t need to know. The FBI had the laptop. The CIA had the reports. The President’s Daily Brief contained blackmail references.
Trump said Biden was compromised. The government’s own records say he was right.
The journalists who looked the other way owe the country an explanation. The voters who were deceived deserve one.