Should Nikki Floris Be Tried? Let’s Skip the Word “Treason” and Talk About the Felonies

— THE TEXT MESSAGE HEARD ROUND THE DEEP STATE —

“I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”

That is a real, declassified text message, sent by a real, named federal employee — Nikki Floris (also rendered “Flores” in some captions), then Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division and, delightfully, the Bureau’s own designated election security lead for 2020. The colleague she sent it to did not respond with alarm. He responded with a smiley face and “you do what you have to do.” Hang in there.

Somewhere in America right now, a parent is being lectured by this same government about “election security” and “trusting our institutions.” I am only a science teacher, but even I know you cannot run a controlled experiment when one of the lab assistants is quietly replacing the data.

So the internet, understandably furious, is asking: is this treason? Should she face trial? Should it be public?

Let me answer all three. But first, because I am apparently constitutionally (pun very much intended) incapable of letting a civics error go unaddressed — a quick lesson.

Treason is the only crime the Founders bothered to define inside the Constitution itself, because the last government they’d lived under used the charge as a political leash. Article III, Section 3 says treason “shall consist only in levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort,” and requires either two witnesses to the same overt act, or a confession in open court.

Note the word “only.” The Framers were not being cute. They had just watched the British Crown stretch “treason” to cover basically any inconvenient dissent, and they wanted it nearly impossible to weaponize domestically ever again. Concealing an internal intelligence report because it embarrasses your boss’s testimony schedule does not levy war on anyone. China, for all its sins, is not a declared wartime enemy under this clause. So no — despite what a very satisfying hashtag might suggest, this is not, legally, treason.

I know. I ruined the fun. Stay with me, because what she actually may have exposed herself to is arguably more useful.

— WHAT SHE CAN ACTUALLY BE CHARGED WITH (THIS IS THE GOOD PART) —

Forget the T-word. Here is the menu, straight from Title 18:

18 U.S.C. § 1001 — knowingly and willfully falsifying, concealing, or covering up a material fact by trick, scheme, or device, within a matter under executive branch jurisdiction. Up to five years. “I’m running a shadow government” is a fairly efficient confession to precisely this.

18 U.S.C. § 2071 — concealment, removal, or mutilation of a public record. Up to three years, PLUS automatic disqualification from ever holding federal office again. That second part should make her Microsoft badge feel a little heavier.

Conspiracy — because none of this happened in a vacuum, and two or more people coordinating to do any of the above is its own separate crime layered on top.

That is not a hashtag. That is a charging document waiting to be filed.

— WHO IS NIKKI FLORIS, EXACTLY? (BECAUSE “SOME FBI EMPLOYEE” UNDERSELLS IT) —

Let us be precise about who we are discussing, because “a rogue employee got carried away” makes this sound smaller than it is. Floris joined the FBI in 2005 and built her career in counterterrorism — the San Diego Field Office, then Headquarters, working threats including Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula and domestic radicalization pipelines. By 2018 she had been elevated to Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division’s Intelligence Branch. This is not an entry-level analyst who misunderstood protocol during a chaotic election week. This is a senior executive who was, simultaneously, the Bureau’s own designated election security lead heading into the most consequential presidential election in a generation.

She testified before the House Judiciary Committee in October 2019 — under oath, in public — describing the Foreign Influence Task Force’s mission to protect American democratic institutions from malign foreign influence. Ten months later, by the record now declassified, she was involved in deciding what foreign influence intelligence the sitting President of the United States was permitted to see. I am only a teacher, but even I recognize irony when it is standing in front of a congressional committee with its right hand raised.

— THE RECEIPTS —

August 6, 2020: Floris and FBI Section Chief Bradley Benavides deliver a “defensive briefing” to Senators Grassley and Johnson — timed precisely while the senators were finalizing their report on Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. Both later testified the script was written by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, not the FBI. Grassley called the content “primarily information we already knew,” unconnected to the Biden probe. It leaked within days and was used by the media to brand two sitting U.S. senators as unwitting vehicles of Russian disinformation for the crime of doing oversight.

September 25, 2020: One day after Director Christopher Wray tells the Senate the FBI has seen no coordinated national voter fraud effort, the FBI’s Albany Field Office produces an Intelligence Information Report — rated high-confidence, from a vetted human source — alleging China was manufacturing tens of thousands of fraudulent driver’s licenses to enable fraudulent mail-in votes. Headquarters recalls it. Internal emails state the quiet part out loud: the reporting “would contradict Director Wray’s testimony.” An Albany analyst objected in writing that citing political optics as a reason to bury intelligence “goes directly against our organization’s mission to remain apolitical.” He was, of course, correct. He was also, of course, ignored.

— OPERATION ROUND RIVER: IT GETS WORSE —

Here is the part that did not make most headlines. In August 2020 — the same month as the Grassley/Johnson briefing — a task force under Floris’s division opened an operation known internally as Round River. Its documented function: relabel more than 40 FBI confidential human sources who had been reporting on the Biden family’s foreign business dealings. Roughly 150 suspicious activity reports tied to that reporting were not pursued. Over twenty shell companies and approximately ten million dollars in flagged foreign payments went uninvestigated. Meanwhile, by every account, this same division was aggressively working the Trump-related leads coming through the pipeline during that exact same window.

Catch external information unfavorable to Biden — bury it. Catch internal information unfavorable to Biden — relabel it so nobody downstream can act on it. That is not one bad afternoon at the office. That is a filing system.

And when Congressman Matt Gaetz pressed her under oath about whether an FBI official carrying on an extramarital relationship with a colleague — while both of them were shaping the intelligence flow around a presidential election — was consistent with, in her own division’s phrase, the highest traditions of government service, Floris declined to answer. Repeatedly. On the congressional record. If the honest answer were an obvious yes, someone in that room would have simply said so.

— THE SUPPORTING CAST, BECAUSE SHE DID NOT DO THIS ALONE —

Bradley Benavides — co-delivered the August briefing, later confirmed under oath it came from ODNI, not independent FBI analysis. A courier, sure. A courier who knew what he was carrying.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the framework that let a Russia-disinformation talking point get dressed up as an “intelligence briefing” and routed straight at two sitting senators conducting legitimate oversight. Ask yourself why a “Notification Framework” exists that can launder a political narrative through an intelligence briefing without a single piece of FBI-collected intelligence behind it.

Christopher Wray — the reason cited, in writing, for burying a credible China report was protecting his own testimony from contradiction. An FBI Director whose Bureau will suppress adverse intelligence to keep his prior sworn statement looking clean is not a bystander. He is the reason the incentive existed in the first place.

The Oversight Project already filed a formal criminal referral against Director Wray back in 2025 for this same pattern — testifying to Congress in a way internal FBI communications directly contradict, then suppressing the intelligence that would have exposed it. That referral is sitting at the Department of Justice right now, under an FBI Director, Kash Patel, who has actually been cooperating with Grassley’s document requests instead of stonewalling them for five years. The paperwork exists. What is missing is the indictment.

And a word about timing, because this matters more than a hashtag: 18 U.S.C. § 1001 carries a five-year statute of limitations. These events happened in 2020. That clock is not decorative — it is closing. If the concealment continued through her 2022 promotion and beyond, prosecutors have a real argument for treating this as an ongoing conspiracy, where the most recent overt act resets the clock rather than the original 2020 recall. But that argument does not make itself. Somebody at DOJ has to actually make it, in writing, before a grand jury, before this becomes one more thing everybody agreed was outrageous and nobody was ever charged for.

— CRIME DOESN’T PAY, THEY SAY —

Floris was promoted in 2022 to a newly created position at the Washington Field Office. She later left for Microsoft, where — and I promise I am not making this up — she now works alongside Lisa Monaco, the former Merrick Garland deputy who oversaw the DOJ’s own greatest hits during the Biden years. What’s next, a federal employee gets rewarded with a cushy corporate landing spot for successfully hiding intelligence from a sitting president… wait, I was just told that already happened.

— THIS IS NOT ANCIENT HISTORY, THIS IS LAST WEEK —

If any of this feels like a six-year-old grudge, recall what happened on July 16, 2026. President Trump used a primetime address to declassify five separate tranches of intelligence in one night: the voting machine and ballot-counting vulnerabilities our own government has known about for years, China’s acquisition of over 220 million American voter records (larger, for context, than the entire 2017 Equifax breach), the intelligence community’s own internal effort to keep that information away from the sitting President, this exact FBI Albany report, the Muskegon, Michigan voter registration fraud case the Biden Justice Department slow-walked into oblivion, and DHS’s finding of roughly 250,000 non-citizens registered to vote in just four states that will not cooperate with federal verification, plus 400,000 dead voters still active on the rolls in the 23 states that do.

Two of the three major broadcast networks did not carry that address live. Network executives called airing an unedited presidential national security address “dangerous.” Read that sentence again, then compare it to an Albany analyst in 2020 warning that burying a report for political reasons “goes directly against our organization’s mission to remain apolitical.” Same instinct. Same playbook. Six years apart. The only thing that changed is the technology used to hide it.

This is not a story about one bad text message from one bureaucrat in 2020. It is a story about an institutional reflex that is still running in real time, in prime time, in 2026.

— SO: PUBLIC TRIAL? YES. HERE IS WHAT THAT ACTUALLY MEANS —

I am not interested in mob justice, and I would ask you not to be either — that is not “old school,” that is just illegal and beneath what this country is supposed to stand for. What I am interested in is the process our Constitution already gives us and that this entire episode was specifically designed to avoid: sunlight.

That means sworn, televised congressional testimony, not closed-door “transcribed interviews” where the follow-up letters go unanswered for years. It means a formal DOJ criminal referral under Sections 1001 and 2071, not a strongly worded op-ed. It means a grand jury, an indictment, and if warranted, an actual open federal courtroom where the government has to prove its case in front of the American public and a jury of their peers — the same standard every citizen who is not wearing a federal badge is held to. That is what “old school” should mean: the system working exactly as designed, instead of a woman’s own admission getting quietly filed away next to the burn bags nobody managed to burn.

Statutes of limitations do not wait for hashtags to cool off, and the pattern did not stop in 2020 — it just went to prime time. If Director Patel’s FBI and Senator Grassley’s committee are serious about the documents they have already released, the next move is not another subpoena for more emails. It is an indictment.

But what do I know? I am only a medic who was trained to diagnose before you treat — funny how nobody at FBI Headquarters ever got that memo.

IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK: LIKE this article so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE this — every share really helps get the word out. Use it. COMMENT below with your take. Should this go to a grand jury, or am I being too generous by not calling it treason? Tell me.

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Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.

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