The intelligence community's quiet war against President Donald Trump was not a conspiracy theory. It was policy. Catherine Herridge has put the November 2020 email on the table, and the words from CIA leadership are an admission that should make every American's blood run cold: they "deliberately massaged one of our pending PDBs... to avoid any direct links to the election."
Read that again. The agency tasked with protecting the homeland from foreign threats deliberately altered the President's Daily Brief to keep the 47th President — then a candidate for reelection — from seeing the full scope of a Chinese multi-domain influence operation. Why? Because the truth might have helped Trump. The motive is not inferred; it is spelled out in the margins. Intelligence officials wrote in their own handwriting that they wanted everything removed that could help President Trump win reelection.
The Paper Trail That Ends the Denial
The target of this purge was a Chinese operation spanning trade, diplomacy, open-source platforms, and social media. The CIA sanded it out of the daily brief, deciding that the American people and their own president could not be trusted with facts that might shift the race. This was not a rogue outlier. This was the system working exactly as designed.
Pedro Israel Orta, a former CIA officer, described the hostile environment inside the agency during Trump's first term. Officials refused even to hang the President's picture on the wall, a custom observed in every prior administration. That same building produced the email admitting the PDB was altered. Herridge is now publishing the tweets and documents that expose the operation.
"Deliberately massaged one of our pending PDBs... to avoid any direct links to the election."
That phrase is an admission of a federal crime. It is evidence that the intelligence community actively interfered in an American presidential election by hiding information from the sitting president. The word "deliberately" destroys the excuse of bureaucratic error. These officials knew exactly what they were doing.
The Next Pages of the Cover-Up
The records Herridge reviewed suggest the same apparatus sat on evidence of China blackmailing Joe Biden's family. That is the next page of a declassification fight that reaches into the Biden family's financial entanglements with the Chinese Communist Party. The November 2020 email is already public. The handwritten line about removing everything that could help Trump's reelection is already public. The blackmail tied to Joe Biden's daily brief is waiting to be forced into sunlight.
For years, the same media outlets that mocked Trump's warnings about election interference now have to confront the CIA's own words. If officials were willing to sand down a PDB in November 2020, what did they do in the months before and after? The answer may sit in the classified folders Catherine Herridge has been fighting to expose.
The Trump administration must release every remaining page. The officials who wrote "deliberately massaged" must be identified by name, put under oath, and exposed in open hearing. Not a book deal, not a CNN analyst chair, not quiet retirement. Americans who still say there was no evidence need to answer a simple question: if CIA leadership hid China's blackmail of Biden and hid China's campaign against Trump, what else is still locked in a classified folder?
