The Trump administration released this week newly declassified documents that appear to reveal political weaponization of intelligence regarding Russiagate and the Clinton Foundation probe.
These documents shine new light on how the Intelligence Community handled the investigation into potential corruption regarding Bill and Hillary Clinton’s family foundation. They also suggest Democrats intentionally leaked classified information to the media—a claim Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., vehemently contests—and that the Intelligence Community intentionally cut corners on its assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in order to help Trump’s campaign.
“The leading figures in the Russia Hoax have spent years deceiving the American public by presenting their manufactured and politicized assessments as credible intelligence,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a statement Tuesday.
Gabbard caused a stir last month when she claimed that a declassified House Intelligence Committee report revealed that President Barack Obama played a key role in manufacturing what President Donald Trump calls the “Russia hoax.”
While Democrats claimed the release of Russiagate documents represented an attempt to distract from questions around deceased financier and convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, the new materials shed light on potential abuses in the Intelligence Community.
Three new pieces of information came to the surface this week.
Gabbard declassified on Tuesday an email exchange between then-National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Rogers raised concerns about the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that President Barack Obama had requested.
“I know that this activity is on a fast-track,” Rogers wrote. Yet he expressed “concerns,” such as whether his team “had sufficient access to the underlying intelligence and sufficient time to review that intelligence.”
“I know that you agree that this is something we need to be 100% comfortable with before we present it to the President—we have one chance to get this right, and it is critical that we do so.”
Clapper responded by stating that “it is essential we … be on the same page, and are all supportive of the report—in the highest tradition of ‘that’s OUR story, and we’re stickin’ to it.'”
He added that “more time is not negotiable” and warned, “We may have to compromise on our ‘normal’ modalities, since we must do this on such a compressed schedule.” Clapper concluded by stating that this project “has to be a team sport.”
“The email released today reinforces what we already exposed: the decision to compromise standards and violate protocols in the creation of the 2017 manufactured intelligence assessment was deliberate and came from the very top,” Gabbard said.
Also earlier this week, Just the News published FBI transcripts of interviews with a former staffer on the House Intelligence Committee in 2017, when Democrat Adam Schiff was the chair.
According to a June 2023 FBI memo, Schiff approved leaking classified information to smear Trump.
The staffer told the FBI that “SCHIFF stated the group would leak classified information which was derogatory to President of the United States DONALD J. TRUMP. SCHIFF stated the information would be used to indict President TRUMP.”
One attendee of the meeting “stated this would be illegal and, upon hearing his concerns, unnamed members of the meeting reassured [him] that they would not be caught leaking classified information.”
Schiff, now a U.S. senator, condemned the release of the memo as “Kash Patel’s latest smear against Senator Schiff.” Speaking to Just the News, he called the attack “absolutely and categorically false” and “the latest in a series of defamatory attacks from the President and his allies meant to distract from their plummeting poll numbers and the Epstein files scandal.”
“These baseless smears are based on allegations that were found to be not reliable, not credible, and unsubstantiated from a disgruntled former staffer who was fired by the House Intelligence Committee for cause in early 2017, including for harassment and potentially compromising activity on official travel for the Committee,” Schiff added.
On Wednesday, Just the News published another declassified memo from 2017, a timeline revealing how top-level intelligence officials directed the suppression of an investigation into the Clinton Foundation during the 2016 election. According to the timeline, analysts attempted to investigate claims of a Clinton Foundation pay-to-play corruption scheme in August 2015, based on the reporting in Peter Schweizer’s book “Clinton Cash,” published that May.
When agents inquired about the investigation, their superiors said other agents were already investigating the matter.
Yet superiors like former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates prevented an investigation, according to the timeline.
In about March, Yates directed the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Arkansas to “shut it down.”
The memo comes from the FBI’s “Arctic Haze” investigation, a probe opened in August 2017 to examine the “unauthorized disclosure of classified information in eight articles published between April and June 2017, The New York Post reported. The FBI turned over the Arctic Haze memos to Congress earlier this week.