Judicial Watch Sues FBI for Records on Recalled Chinese Election Interference Report

 

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for records about the FBI’s recall of a September 2020 intelligence report alleging that China manufactured and exported fraudulent U.S. driver’s licenses to help Chinese nationals cast fraudulent mail-in votes for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden (Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice (Case 1:26-cv-03774)).

The lawsuit was filed after the FBI failed to respond to Judicial Watch’s July 10, 2025, FOIA request for the communications of former FBI Deputy Assistant Directors Nikki Floris and Tonya Ugoretz about the report’s dissemination and recall, the FBI’s efforts to assess the accuracy of its contents, and any subsequent investigative activity.

In October 2026 Floris, who served as deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, was charged with lying to Congress about Hunter Biden investigations. Ugoretz served as deputy assistant director of the Cyber Division.

According to internal FBI emails released in July 2025 by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the FBI’s Albany Field Office issued an Intelligence Information Report (IIR) on September 25, 2020, concerning allegations that the Chinese government was producing and exporting fraudulent U.S. driver’s licenses as part of an effort to generate tens of thousands of fraudulent mail-in votes for Biden.

The released emails indicate that officials raised concerns that the intelligence would contradict testimony given by then-FBI Director Christopher Wray, who told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee one day earlier, on September 24, 2020, that the FBI had not historically seen a coordinated national voter-fraud effort in a major election.

The report was recalled following intervention by FBI headquarters.

An Albany intelligence analyst subsequently warned, “I found this troubling because it implied to me that one of the reasons we aren’t putting this out is for a political reason, which goes directly against our organization’s mission to remain apolitical …”

Grassley’s office also reported:

On October 8, 2020, an official with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)-China division confirmed FITF-China had still not approved a reissue of the IIR. Despite FITF-China offering to “discuss next steps” for the IIR, the FBI on June 27, 2025, confirmed to Grassley that they had “found no information to indicate that FITF-China aggressively investigated the reported information, despite corroborating intergovernmental reporting and logical investigative leads.”

“The FBI appears to have put politics ahead of its duty to investigate potential Chinese election interference,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The American people deserve to know what the report revealed and who ordered it buried.”

Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of its work, Judicial Watch assembled a team of highly experienced election law attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other achievements.

Judicial Watch’s lawsuits and legal actions have caused the removal of six million ineligible names from voter lists nationwide.

In October 2026, Judicial Watch filed an amici curiae (friends of the court) brief with the Allied Educational Foundation (AEF) urging the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruling restricting Arizona’s authority to require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration and remove noncitizens from the registration list.

In August 2026, Judicial Watch filed an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court supporting the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s petition for review of a Ninth Circuit decision that allows Hawaii to shield its statewide voter registration list from public disclosure. Judicial Watch is urging the Supreme Court to take up a challenge to the Ninth Circuit ruling and overturn the decision, citing federal law designed to foster transparency that allows the use of voting rolls to uncover fraud and errors.

In July 2026, Judicial Watch forced the release of records from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that show that an ODNI task force stated that the Intelligence Community identified election-system vulnerabilities that could be exploited by U.S. adversaries and withheld information about those vulnerabilities from the American people.

In July 2026, Judicial Watch announced that records from the Virginia Department of Elections showed the commonwealth cancelled 6,531 “declared noncitizen” voter registrations between June 2024 and June 2026.

Also in July, the Justice Department filed a motion to intervene in Judicial Watch’s federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a California political candidate and a state political party against the State of California due to its failure to maintain accurate voter rolls as required by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

In January 2026, in a historic case filed by Judicial Watch, the Supreme Court decided 7-2 in favor of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors who were before the court to vindicate their standing to challenge an Illinois law allowing the counting of ballots received up to 14 days after Election Day.

A federal court in Illinois ruled that Judicial Watch’s lawsuit to force the cleaning of voter rolls may proceed in that state.

In July 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit adopted the argument put forth by Judicial Watch and Allied Educational Foundation (AEF) in their amici curiae brief when it upheld Alabama’s 2011 Photo Voter Identification Law.

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The post Judicial Watch Sues FBI for Records on Recalled Chinese Election Interference Report appeared first on Judicial Watch.

Source: https://www.judicialwatch.org/sues-fbi-records-recalled-chinese-election-interference-report/