In June of 2018, 18 months after Obama exited stage left, and in the high heat and fury of the Trump 45 “Russia-Russia-Russia” hysteria, Ben Rhodes, Obama’s chief speechwriter, published a memoir of his time in the Obama White House, “The World As It Is.”  I read it shortly after it came out and recently recalled he’d made some observations about the summer of 2016 and some “off-the-books” Situation Room meetings that took place.  In light of what we’ve since learned, it seemed to me that the events surrounding them could be instructive.  And damning.  And they are.

Page 390:

The Clinton campaign [early summer 2016] was already fingering the Russians [for the DNC emails that were hacked], but when the White House and NSC press shops would ask what we could say about it publicly, we’d be given little running room by the intelligence community. It took us weeks to be authorized to say even that the FBI was investigating the DNC hack. On the subject of Russian complicity, we could only cite past statements by U.S. officials expressing concern about Russian hacking. [Emphasis added.]

James Comey (FBI.gov)

Well, of course they’d been “given little running room by the intelligence community” because the Intelligence Community — James Comey’s FBI, specifically — had never physically examined the DNC’s hard drives. Only Crowdstrike had and the FBI simply took their word for it that the Russians had infiltrated them. So far as we know they remain unexamined by any federal agency to this day.

During this period, the summer of 2016, Obama was trying to walk a very fine Russian line: If he said (or did) too much about Russian malfeasance, and Hillary won — as he fully expected she would — then her win could be tainted by claims of Russian interference and her presidency’s legitimacy questioned, and he couldn’t risk that.  But if he didn’t say enough, then the whole “Russia-Russia-Russia” narrative they were building wouldn’t work to taint Trump to prevent him from winning, or, undermine his legitimacy if, heaven forfend, the absolutely unthinkable happened and he actually won the thing.

No wonder Ben was having trouble getting the I.C. to fish or cut bait.  The whole thing was a propaganda scam, an information operation, a kind of domestic color revolution being run by Obama out of the Oval Office, and the I.C. was now locked down (We’ll get to that shortly) because of the scheming going on in there.

The I.C. couldn’t say anything in the normal course of business anymore. The usual funnels of information  were narrowed, even shut down.  They had to wait for orders from on high (Obama) before they could tell Ben anything and Ben was being locked out of the very meetings where those decisions were being made — for now.  Later, he’d be in them, but not quite yet.

Page 391:

That summer, I noticed that Situation Room meetings were being held that weren’t marked on the calendar. It was the same pattern that prefaced the bin Laden raid — cabinet-level officials showing up for meetings that weren’t on the books. I knew enough not to ask questions. I hoped it was a sign of some special operation — maybe we were going to nab Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda, or Baghdadi, the leader of ISIL. Whatever it was, there was a premium being put on secrecy, and the group meeting was very small. [Emphasis added]

The summer of 2016 was an extremely busy time on the conspiracy front. On just one day, July 5th, three major events took place; one very public, two decidedly secret: 

1. Comey cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing in that infamous presser of his.
2. Dossier-man Christopher Steele delivered his first report (of many which together would comprise what came to be known as the “dossier”) to Comey’s FBI. 
3. The FISA court denied the Comey FBI’s request for a FISA surveillance warrant on the Trump campaign.

FISA denials rare to the point of vanishing. The application must have been gravely deficient. Later, of course, they went back for a second bite of the apple and got it. Either way, there’s absolutely no way Comey is quarterbacking all of this rogue. There’s no way he’s doing any of this without Obama knowing all about it and those conversations, we now know,  happened in those meetings Mr. Rhodes was locked out of.

Two weeks later, on July 19th, Trump officially became the Republican nominee for president. The very next day, July 20th, one of Obama’s “fixers,” then the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, Lisa Monaco, made a little visit to ODNI.  (It just so happens that she’s on Trump’s radar lately.  He mentioned her twice not too long ago while discussing Biden’s autopen.)

While there, Monaco met with then- “Director of National Intelligence James Clapper before receiving a briefing and tour of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center…”  Less than a week later, on the 26th, Obama shifted all “cyber threat” monitoring over to the now increasingly indispensable man, James Comey.

Nothing good in Washington, D.C., ever happens that fast.

Via USA Today:

“A presidential directive signed by President Obama [put] the FBI in charge of responding to all cyber threats. ... Obama's homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, said the change was necessary… "It spells out which federal agencies are responsible.”

Two days later, on July 28th, now that the funnels of information were to flow to and through James Comey, his FBI formally opened Crossfire Hurricane, the name for the investigation into any connections between Trump and Russia.

As noted by X user Mike Benz, July 28th was the very same day “that Hillary Clinton approved ‘a proposal to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.’”

There are no coincidences in politics.

Even if one could argue that the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign weren’t acting in concert before, they most definitely were now.

Via The Federalist:

“…The recently declassified [July 2025] HPSCI report also revealed a more subtle — but equally significant — detail, namely Obama’s role in hiding intel from the analysts...”

Ben Rhodes, locked out of the meetings thus far, made this observation to The Washington Post six months after the Trump Inauguration, in June of 2017, with the benefit of some hindsight:

“We weren’t able to put all of those pieces together in real time, and in many ways, that complete picture is still being filled in.”

That’s right, Ben.  It was a feature, not a flaw.

Because information was so severely siloed it’s crucial to note now that anytime the institutional left cites the Senate Intel Report signed-off on by then-Acting Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Marco Rubio, or any of the other myriad federal reports (Mueller, Durham) on Russia and the 2016 election, the I.C. was working off only partially visible intel. It was like folding the page of a book in half lengthwise. The I.C.’s eyes were blind to the other half … the half that exonerated Trump.

The conspiracy now had a name, the imprimatur of legitimacy, however fraudulent, and was well underway.