Donald Trump warned voters during the 2020 campaign that China knew plenty about the Biden family business machine, and that Beijing could use that knowledge as leverage over Joe Biden.

The political class sneered, the legacy press did its usual eye roll, and anyone asking obvious questions was shoved into the conspiracy corner.

Now, newly discussed records are making that old media performance look even worse.

Emmy winning investigative reporter Catherine Herridge has been digging through declassified material tied to China and its 2020 election influence operation, and what she found should have set off alarm bells across every serious newsroom in America.

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Herridge told Katie Pavlich on Katie Pavlich Tonight on NewsNation that the records reference blackmail by China connected to the Biden family.

That is not a small detail, and it certainly is not the kind of thing the press can wave away with another lazy lecture about misinformation.

"I found these records which are talking about blackmail by China," Herridge said.

"It was for President Biden's daily brief. I can conclude, I think, that it was probably about targeting his family."

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That is about as direct as it gets.

The records were not some random internet rumor, and they were not buried in a dark basement guarded by a dragon, despite how hard the corporate press may pretend otherwise.

Herridge made clear that the issue was available to anyone willing to look.

"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. All you had to do was spend a couple of hours."

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A couple of hours.

That is apparently too much effort for the same media crowd that had endless energy for Russia hysteria, anonymous leaks, and breathless panels about every anti Trump narrative that wandered through Washington.

The revelations follow Trump’s primetime address to the nation, where he highlighted newly declassified intelligence about China allegedly acquiring 220 million American voter files.

He also described how career officials inside the intelligence community worked to bury the seriousness of that operation from senior leaders, including Trump himself.

Herridge has since connected those concerns to broader questions about what was happening inside the federal bureaucracy during the 2020 campaign.

She pointed to an instant message from senior FBI counterintelligence official Nikki Floris that Herridge described as evidence of a "shadow government" inside the bureau.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told Herridge that in August 2020, around the same time the Chinese influence operation was being suppressed, Floris gave him and Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa a defensive briefing.

Johnson believes that briefing was presented as being about Russia, but was really meant to steer the senators away from the Hunter Biden laptop and prepare the ground for calling it disinformation.

That matters because the laptop was not a minor campaign sideshow.

It contained material raising serious questions about the Biden family’s foreign dealings, including the kind of connections and money trails that responsible journalists once claimed to care about.

Instead, Americans got the usual establishment routine.

Big Tech throttled the story, media outlets dismissed it, intelligence veterans helped frame it as foreign trickery, and the same crowd now demanding trust from the public acted shocked when Americans stopped believing them.

Herridge also spoke with a senior member of former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s investigations team.

According to that account, some officials inside the intelligence community believed they knew better than Trump and needed to manage what he saw.

"They had to save President Trump from his own instincts, from his own tendencies," Herridge said.

She described a bureaucracy invested in preserving a "globalist view," whether that meant minimizing China’s threat or labeling the Biden laptop as "Russian disinformation".

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That is the central scandal here.

It is not only that China may have had leverage connected to the Biden family, although that alone should be enough to trigger a serious national reckoning.

The deeper problem is that people entrusted with protecting the country appear to have decided what the public was allowed to know.

They picked narratives, protected institutions, and treated voters like a nuisance to be managed.

For years, Americans were told concerns about Hunter Biden, foreign cash, and China’s possible leverage over Joe Biden were wild right wing fantasies.

The evidence keeps marching in the opposite direction, and the smug fact checkers are looking more ridiculous by the day.

Trump said Biden was compromised, and the record now gives that warning a lot more weight than the press ever admitted.

Washington owes Americans real answers about what China knew, who buried it, and how much national security was put at risk while the guardians of democracy were busy guarding Democrats.

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