Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge has drawn attention to declassified records that reference Chinese blackmail efforts in the context of influence operations around the 2020 election. According to her account, materials prepared for inclusion in a President's Daily Brief discussed blackmail by China. She has stated that after reviewing the records she concluded the targeting was probably directed at the Biden family. Herridge has also described a pattern of limited scrutiny by legacy media outlets that had access to the same materials yet showed little interest in examining them closely.
The claim does not stand in isolation. Congressional investigations, particularly those conducted by the House Oversight Committee, previously documented that Biden family associates received millions of dollars from entities linked to China, often through layered corporate structures. Those financial connections were already a matter of public record and had raised questions about potential leverage, influence, or compromise. Herridge's reading of the newly available intelligence materials adds a more explicit blackmail dimension to an existing pattern of foreign payments and business dealings.
What makes the episode significant is less the existence of any single document than the institutional response that appears to have surrounded related information. Intelligence assessments concerning Chinese influence activities, warnings about family financial entanglements, and earlier reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop were met at various points with scepticism, delayed attention, or active efforts to frame the stories as disinformation. When a journalist of Herridge's experience reports that references to Chinese blackmail sat in records prepared for senior officials and yet received minimal public examination, it reinforces a broader pattern: certain lines of inquiry involving the Biden family and foreign adversaries were treated as politically radioactive rather than as matters requiring thorough, transparent investigation.
Blackmail, by its nature, is difficult to prove in real time. The public versions of the records do not appear to name the Biden family explicitly, and Herridge's conclusion remains an interpretation drawn from the available materials. No declassified document has been widely presented that demonstrates successful coercion of policy decisions. Yet the combination of substantial financial flows from China-linked sources, intelligence interest in blackmail tactics, and a demonstrated reluctance by major media and parts of the national security apparatus to pursue the story aggressively creates a serious credibility problem. In a system that depends on public trust in both intelligence assessments and press scrutiny, selective blindness is itself a form of institutional failure.
The deeper issue is structural. When political incentives align against examining potential foreign leverage over a prominent political family, the ordinary mechanisms of accountability weaken. Intelligence agencies may downplay or compartmentalise inconvenient findings. News organisations may decline to invest resources in stories that challenge preferred narratives. The result is an information environment in which the public receives a filtered version of risks involving a major adversary. China has long used economic ties, elite capture, and kompromat as tools of influence. Treating evidence of such efforts directed at the family of a senior American political figure as radioactive rather than urgent does not make the underlying vulnerability disappear. It only ensures that the vulnerability is less fully understood.
Herridge's reporting does not close the case. It reopens questions that should never have been allowed to close so easily. Financial records already established the money trail. Intelligence materials now appear to have flagged blackmail as a live concern at the highest levels. The decision by much of the legacy media and parts of the national security bureaucracy to look away remains the most consequential fact of all. In matters of foreign influence and national security, wilful blindness is not neutrality. It is a choice with consequences.