Hillary Clinton approved a plan devised by her campaign to falsely smear Donald Trump with claims of Russian collusion to distract from the email scandal that haunted Clinton during the 2016 election, newly declassified documents show.
The scheme was detailed in two newly declassified memos obtained by the Obama administration showing conversations between Democratic National Committee leadership and operatives from liberal billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
In July 2016, Clinton approved a plan to emphasize “Putin’s support for Trump” to turn attention away from her email scandal and equate “Putin’s efforts” to influence the election with actual hijacking of American electoral infrastructure. Her foreign policy advisor Julianne Smith devised the scheme to frame Trump as a pawn for the Russians leading up to the 2016 election.
Open Society senior vice president Leonard Benardo was looped into the plan and detailed its intended consequences in a set of purported emails sent in July 2016.
“Julie [sic] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump,” Benardo said on July 25, 2016.
“Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire,” he added.
“HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level,” he wrote in another purported email two days later.
The intelligence was featured in the annex to special counsel John Durham’s report on the FBI’s abuses in its investigation of evidence-free claims tying Donald Trump to the Russians.
The ultimate purpose of the Clinton plan was to make Russian interference a “domestic issue” and pressure the intelligence community to speed up its search for evidence by suggesting Russia was actively targeting election infrastructure.
FBI personnel involved with its investigation into Russian collusion believed Benardo’s emails were “likely authentic,” although Durham could not retrieve the exact emails from the Open Society Foundations.
Durham concluded that “Smith was, at minimum, playing a role in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to tie Trump to Russia” based on documents in his possession. He assessed that Benardo’s emails were likely composites from a set of emails Russian intelligence obtained by hacking several liberal think tanks including the Open Society Foundations.
Multiple high-ranking Obama administration officials had a briefing in August 2016 about Russian interference and the Clinton campaign’s plan to attack Trump and connect him to Russian meddling. In September 2016, the CIA sent the FBI an “investigative referral” that referred to the “purported Clinton campaign plan” and other information.
The CIA assessed that information about the Clinton campaign’s plan was not a Russian fabrication, Durham’s annex notes. Durham also points out the “FBI was fully alerted to the possibility that at least some of the information it was receiving about the Trump campaign might have its origin either with the Clinton campaign or its supporters, or alternatively, was the product of Russian disinformation.”
Durham’s annex features part of a March 2016 memo outlining the Democratic Party’s strategy of “discrediting Trump” by having Clinton staffers and “special services” unveil ties between Trump and the Russian mafia. The “special services” could refer to Christopher Steele, author of the debunked Steele memo claiming to reveal the ties between Trump and Russia. Clinton’s campaign and the DNC partially funded Steele’s memo in their quest to obtain opposition research on Trump.
The March 2016 memo suggests President Obama was attempting to put his thumb on the scales to try to mitigate the fallout from the Clinton scandal. Obama “sanctioned the use of all administrative levers to remove possibly negative effects from the FBI investigation of cases related to the Clinton Foundation and the email correspondence in the State Department,” the memo reads.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other members of the Trump administration declassified the Durham annex at the request of Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Based on the Durham annex, the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means,” Grassley said in a statement.
“These intelligence reports and related records, whether true or false, were buried for years. History will show that the Obama and Biden administration’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump.”
Patel said the FBI discovered the Durham annex along with a pile of other documents in back room and worked to declassify it as soon as possible.
“It revealed a highly classified piece of the Durham report: evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax. We worked with Chairman Grassley and declassified the documents immediately. And now the American people can see the truth for themselves,” Patel said.
The Durham annex is one of several sets of documents the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have declassified to provide further information on the role the Obama administration played in facilitating the Russiagate scandal during Trump’s first term.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has sent the Justice Department a criminal referral calling for the prosecution of Obama-era intelligence officials. Obama has dismissed the calls for prosecution and argued Gabbard’s new revelations do not contain any new information about Russia’s efforts in the 2016 election.
The Justice Department has set up a task force to investigate Gabbard’s assertions that Obama orchestrated a “treasonous” conspiracy against his successor and promote the false claim that Trump colluded with Russia in 2016.