Judicial Watch Sues FBI for Records on Chinese Election Interference Report/a>
Judicial Watch Sues FBI for Aldrich Ames Spy Files
Drunk Illegal Immigrant Killed Illinois Woman While on Probation for Felony DUI
Mexican Charged in Iwo Jima Memorial Vandalism Was Protected Under Obama Amnesty
Judicial Watch Sues FBI for Records on Chinese Election Interference Report
We are suing the FBI for records on its recall of a September 2020 intelligence report about China’s manufacture and export of fake U.S. driver’s licenses in an alleged effort to help Chinese nationals cast mail-in votes for Joe Biden. Internal FBI emails released by Sen. Chuck Grassley raise questions about FBI headquarters’ handling of the report and whether then-Director Christopher Wray was shielded from political fallout.
We 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 fake 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)).
We sued after the FBI failed to respond to our 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. The American people deserve to know what the report revealed and who ordered it buried.
We are a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of our work, we 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.
Our lawsuits and legal actions have caused the removal of six million ineligible names from voter lists nationwide.
In October 2026 we 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 we 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. We are 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 we 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 we 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 our 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 we filed, 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 our 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.
Judicial Watch Sues FBI for Aldrich Ames Spy Files
We’re suing the FBI for records on Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer who spied for the Soviet Union and Russia for nearly nine years, compromising U.S. intelligence operations and exposing American intelligence sources. We want to know how the FBI handled the investigation—and what failures allowed his espionage to go undetected for years.
The lawsuit was filed after the FBI failed to respond to Judicial Watch’s January 2026 FOIA request for all records concerning any FBI investigation of Ames (Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice (Case 1:26-cv-03818)).
In April 1997, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) produced a report titled “A Review of the FBI’s Performance in Uncovering the Espionage Activities of Aldrich Hazen Ames,” which is summarized here. The summary details failures by the FBI and CIA to investigate the loss of American intelligence sources, which allowed Ames’ espionage to go undetected for years:
The story of the Ames case begins with a catastrophic and unprecedented loss of Soviet intelligence sources suffered by the CIA and the FBI in 1985 and 1986. Both agencies initially mounted efforts aimed at determining the cause of these losses (which stemmed from Ames’ collaboration with the KGB) but as time passed, the level of attention devoted to this issue by the FBI and the CIA sharply declined.
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The failure of the CIA and the FBI to pursue a joint investigation of the lost assets issue prior to 1991 significantly delayed the detection of Ames’ espionage. Neither internal CIA and FBI records concerning Ames’ 1985-86 unreported meetings with a Soviet diplomat, nor bank records showing Ames’ subsequent large cash deposits, were examined. Moreover, potentially incriminating information concerning Ames that became available at the CIA at this time was not properly referred to the FBI for investigation.
By late 1989, CIA personnel began to receive highly disturbing information concerning Ames’ finances. A CIA colleague of Ames reported to CIA counterintelligence personnel that Ames, who had been experiencing financial difficulties prior to 1986, experienced a sudden, unexplained improvement in his finances. This CIA employee reported that Ames had purchased a $540,000 house in 1989 and engaged in lavish spending, all on a Government salary of $40,000 to $50,000 a year. The CIA employee’s tip also specifically linked Ames’ sudden wealth to his knowledge of the cases compromised in 1985 and 1986.
The CIA’s investigation of this lead regarding Ames quickly revealed more disturbing information, including the fact that Ames had purchased his $540,000 home in 1989 for cash, i.e., with no mortgage, and that he had engaged in three substantial cash transactions, totaling more than $50,000, between 1985 and 1989. Despite these facts and the existence of a 1988 FBI/CIA Memorandum of Understanding stating that the CIA would provide timely notice to the FBI of any conduct by CIA officers that raised counterintelligence concerns, no information concerning Ames was provided to the FBI prior to mid-1991.
The FBI opened its investigation in May 1993. Ames and his wife both pled guilty to federal charges related to espionage and tax evasion in 1994.
Ames died in January 2026 at age 84 while serving a life sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland.
“The Aldrich Ames espionage case exposed serious failures in our intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The American people deserve to know the facts about this disturbing chapter in our nation’s intelligence history.”
Drunk Illegal Immigrant Killed Illinois Woman While on Probation for Felony DUI
Federal records show that the illegal immigrant responsible for a fatal 2025 Illinois crash was heavily intoxicated, had a lengthy criminal record and was on probation for felony DUI when he drove head-on into a 61-year-old woman. Our Corruption Chronicles blog relates the horrible story.
The heavily intoxicated illegal immigrant who killed a woman last summer in a head-on crash in Illinois had a disturbing history of drunk driving and a lengthy rap sheet but was protected by the state’s sanctuary policies, federal records obtained by Judicial Watch confirm. Days after the collision in early August of last year Judicial Watch submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for information involving the Guatemalan migrant, Rolando Ico-Choc, who was 30 years old at the time. A little past noon on August 9, 2025, the illegal alien drove southbound in the northbound lanes of a rural Illinois highway, colliding head-on with a vehicle driven by 61-year-old Darcy Connolly-Brunner. Both drivers were pronounced deceased at the scene, according to law enforcement officials where the incident occurred in Stephenson County, which is in the northwestern part of the state near the Wisconsin border.
Weeks later the toxicology report revealed Ico-Choc had a blood alcohol level of .244, more than three times the legal limit in Illinois, and that no alcohol was detected in Connolly-Brunner’s system. The crime received more media attention than usual because the victim was the mother of a former professional basketball star, Sophie Brunner, an All-American forward at Arizona State University who played for the U.S. national team and the Phoenix Mercury in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). Few bothered to question or report the illegal immigrant’s extensive criminal history even after ICE issued a scathing statement just days after the crash trashing “reckless sanctuary laws” that prevented local authorities from transferring the “dangerous alien at least seven separate times” in the three years before the deadly crash despite a “longstanding criminal record.” The Homeland Security agency charged with enforcing immigration laws revealed at the time that Ico-Choc had been arrested repeatedly for driving under the influence and other serious offenses, including endangering the life of a child, domestic battery, and resisting law enforcement.
Specific details were not offered at the time, and ICE took nearly a year to provide Judicial Watch with records that shed more light on the vast criminal history of an offender repeatedly shielded from deportation by one state’s sanctuary law. Nearly a decade ago Illinois enacted the TRUST Act, known as the gold standard of broad statewide protection against deportation even for illegal aliens that commit felonies like Ico-Choc. The measure prohibits all law enforcement agencies in the Prairie State from participating in federal civil immigration enforcement or cooperating with federal authorities. It also bans police from stopping, arresting, or detaining individuals based on immigration status or honoring ICE detainers. The radical statewide sanctuary policies ensure criminal aliens are free to reoffend, even after committing brutal crimes against Americans, a recently published congressional probe claims. In 2024 and 2025 alone, the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) released nearly 100 criminal aliens back onto the streets instead of cooperating with ICE, according to the investigation conducted by the House Judiciary Committee. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office was the biggest offender releasing 408 criminal aliens from its custody in 2025 instead of honoring active ICE detainers, including those with pending charges for domestic battery with bodily harm, domestic violence, and firearms offenses.
The federal records obtained by Judicial Watch, 29 pages in total, document multiple exchanges involving Ico-Choc’s encounters with law enforcement dating back to 2022 between ICE, the Stephenson County Sheriff’s Office, and the Freeport Police Department in Stephenson County’s largest city. They also show that the illegal immigrant was on probation for a previous felony drunk-driving conviction when he killed Connolly-Brunner. Beginning in the spring of 2022 Ico-Choc was arrested and charged three times in a little over a year for driving under the influence (DUI) and his license was revoked. In 2023 he was convicted of domestic battery against his wife and received two years’ probation, the records show. In most of the cases ICE issued a detainer to take custody and deport the Guatemalan, but local authorities refused and released him instead. The last ICE detainer, which could have saved an innocent woman’s life, was issued on January 18, 2025, with the Stephenson County Jail and listed Ico-Choc’s three convictions for felony aggravated DUI, domestic battery, and DUI. The jail released him early the next morning, the records obtained by Judicial Watch reveal. Months later he got drunk and drove head on into Connolly-Brunner.
Mexican Charged in Iwo Jima Memorial Vandalism Was Protected Under Obama Amnesty
The Mexican national charged with using a sledgehammer to destroy portions of the historic Iwo Jima Memorial outside Marine Corps Base Quantico was an illegal immigrant protected for more than a decade under an Obama-era amnesty program, as our Corruption Chronicles blog reports.
The Mexican national who desecrated a World War II monument in Quantico, Virginia, last week is an illegal immigrant protected for over a decade under an Obama amnesty program for adults who came to the United States illegally as children. His name is Miguel Alonso Maldonado Soriano, and on October 21 Prince William County Police caught him actively destroying the Iwo Jima Memorial outside Marine Corps Base Quantico with a sledgehammer. “The damage to the memorial included the complete removal of one of the heads of the individual Marine statues, removal of multiple rifle barrels on the monument, and the defacing and disfiguring of other parts of the monument,” according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which announced this week that Soriano faces federal charges of willfully injuring or committing a depredation against property of the United States and willfully injuring or destroying a monument on public property commemorating the service of persons in the armed forces. If convicted, he faces up to a decade in prison.
Soriano was originally charged in Virginia with state crimes of felony destruction of property, trespassing with intent to damage property and felony injury to a monument, and this week a Prince William County Circuit Court judge granted him a $2,500 bond. Authorities estimate he caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the historic statue, which is located at the entrance of Marine Corps Base Quantico, around 36 miles south of Washington DC. The limestone monument depicts six U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Japan’s Iwo Jima Island during World War II and is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken in 1945 by Associated Press photojournalist Joe Rosenthal. The statue is a smaller replica of the original bronze monument outside of Arlington National Cemetery which stands about 78 feet tall with 32-foot high figures raising a 60-foot flagpole on a rock slope above a granite base. The flag flies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by presidential proclamation. “This hateful illegal alien attacked a memorial to our brave Marines, decapitating one of the statues with a sledgehammer,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin said this week, confirming what much of the establishment media has failed to report, that Soriano benefitted from Obama’s special amnesty.
Soriano entered the U.S. illegally at an unknown date and location in 1999, according to DHS, and was granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status in October 2014 by the Obama administration. Under the controversial initiative over 800,000 illegal immigrants under the age of 31 have been shielded from deportation and allowed to obtain work permits and drivers’ licenses. Although the Trump administration has cracked down on DACA there are still over 436,000 illegal aliens in the program, according to government figures. A sizable chunk of DACA applicants have arrest records, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the DHS agency that administers the nation’s lawful immigration system. Years ago, the agency disclosed that nearly 110,000 illegal aliens who requested the special Obama-era reprieve for adults who came to the U.S. as children “through no fault of their own” have criminal records that include assault, battery, rape, murder and driving under the influence. Tens of thousands of DACA recipients were found to have over 10 arrests, according to USCIS.
Those protected by DACA include rioters and looters arrested and charged with crimes during a Black Lives Matter “Justice for George Floyd” protest in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. This includes a then 30-year-old Mexican national, Maxima Guerrero, who was a community organizer with a Phoenix-based grassroots migrant justice organization called Puente Movement. During the riots, Guerrero and her fellow DACA friends occupied a vehicle “loaded with incendiary devices,” a high-level Phoenix Police source told Judicial Watch. Soriano, who since childhood has lived in the quaint Virginia town of Stafford, about two dozen miles south of the nation’s capital, was arrested for trespassing there in 2022. By then he was already protected under DACA, which expires every few years and was renewed by the Biden administration. His DACA has since expired, and a renewal request was denied earlier this month.
Until next week,
