found within National Security Agency foreign intelligence reports relating to members of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign quietly concluded with no findings of wrongdoing. Donald Trump claimed that this unmasking request was an act of espionage since the beginning of his presidency and was emphatically hyping the probe as an "October Surprise" for the 2020 election. It was also revealed that unmasking requests have significantly increased under the Trump presidency according to statistical transparency reports by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. An October 14 article by the New York Post related to emails found on an external hard drive of a laptop computer belonging to Hunter Biden was considered to be an October surprise, although almost all media outlets at the time questioned the article's veracity. 2022 midterm elections On October 3, 2022, The Daily Beast reported that former football player Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee in the 2022 United States Senate election in Georgia, paid for his wife's 2009 abortion despite claiming to be "100% pro-life". Walker's son Christian additionally stated that the woman whose abortion Walker paid for was Christian's mother. Christian Walker additionally slammed his father's comments on being a "family man", claiming Herschel Walker "left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence", additionally revealing that Herschel Walker's family had never wanted him to run for office. See also Opposition research Wag the Dog, a novel and film describing a fictional war started solely to distract attention from a presidential scandal Canadian Bacon, another film about a fictional war to distract attention from a presidential scandal Zinoviev letter References Bibliography External links Beware an October Surprise from bin Laden - Joseph S. Nye, Harvard Kennedy School Calls for ending the FBI's selective use of polygraphs to eliminate suspects. 1980 neologisms October United States presidential elections terminology