NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A mong the most troubling conclusions in special counsel John Durham’s Russiagate report is that the FBI — even as it relied on Clinton-campaign-funded opposition research against Donald Trump that it failed to verify — ignored strongly supported intelligence that Hillary Clinton was intentionally smearing Trump as a Putin puppet.
To my mind, Durham is being too kind.
Perusing the report, I find it impossible to draw any other conclusion than that the FBI, and the Obama administration more broadly, did not ignore the intelligence about Clinton’s strategy but rather that the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the United States government knowingly abetted Clinton’s implementation of the strategy.
Here is what Durham recounts about American spy agencies’ covert discovery in late July 2016: Their Russian counterparts had assessed that Clinton had approved a campaign plan “to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”
One objective of this demagoguery was to distract from Clinton’s own email scandal, which was far more consequential to the 2016 election than the DNC emails. Clinton was not a meaningful participant in the DNC emails; they factored into the election only as a prop to portray Trump as complicit in a Russian-hacking conspiracy.
Clinton and her campaign staffers scoffed, in interviews by Durham’s office, that the Russian intelligence analysis was “ridiculous” and “disinformation.” But the analysis was obviously true, regardless of whether the Russians truly believed it or were floating it to confuse our spies.
The Clinton campaign sponsored the bogus “dossier” prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele. It alleged that “there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and Russian leadership.” This was a fabrication: Steele’s source, Igor Danchenko, never actually spoke to Sergei Millian, to whom this “intelligence” was attributed. Millian never made the claim.
It was in the context of this nonexistent “conspiracy of cooperation” that Steele claimed Russia had hacked the DNC emails to help Trump win the election. Through Steele, his Fusion GPS confederates, and the campaign’s lawyers, Clinton’s Trump–Russia “collusion” smear was peddled to friendly media and sympathetic government officials.
With equal fervor, moreover, the Clinton campaign concocted the farcical claim that Trump had established a communications back channel with Putin through servers at Alfa Bank, an important Russian financial institution.
After succeeding in getting this nonsense publicized less than two months before Election Day, Clinton herself tweeted: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based Bank.” Jake Sullivan, one of Clinton’s top aides (and now President Biden’s national-security adviser) breathlessly proclaimed that Alfa Bank “could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow”; that “this secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia”; and that “we can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.”
Clearly, there was a Clinton campaign strategy to frame Trump. Yet the most sensible interpretation of the evidence Durham has amassed is not that the FBI, in evaluating its collusion evidence, failed to weigh intercepted Russian intelligence about that strategy. It is that the FBI was well aware of Clinton’s strategy, fully expected Clinton to be the next president, and helped implement the strategy, regardless of what Russian spies may or may not have thought about it.
The FBI knowingly treated Clinton with kid gloves. FBI lawyer Lisa Page warned the bureau’s senior intelligence investigator, Peter Strzok, to tread lightly in interviewing Clinton about the email scandal — fearful that, upon winning the election, Clinton would otherwise be vengeful against the FBI.
The special counsel elaborates on attempts by two foreign governments to buy influence with Clinton by making donations to her campaign. Contrary to the zealousness with which the FBI opened a full-blown investigation of Trump’s campaign based on risibly thin information in the stretch run of the 2016 race, the bureau sat on the Clinton information for months — even though the first foreign scheme commenced in 2014, before Clinton had even formally announced her candidacy. Clinton’s campaign was given a defensive briefing to ensure she was not placed in a compromising position. Trump’s campaign, by contrast, was immediately subjected to a full-court press, including eavesdropping and the deployment of informants — which persisted for a year, even though the evidence gathered was exculpatory.
Durham documents that President Obama, Vice President Biden, top intelligence officials, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI director Comey were fully briefed by CIA director John Brennan on Russia’s assessment of Clinton’s plan to frame Trump.
According to Durham, it appears that FBI headquarters withheld the information from some investigators who should have had it. No surprise there. We learned during Durham’s unsuccessful prosecution of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann that headquarters concealed from the bureau’s own investigators that Sussmann was the source of the Alfa Bank data. But this information about a Clinton strategy to smear Trump wasn’t ignored. Rather, it was echoed. At the same time that the FBI had this information, the bureau nevertheless went to the FISA court and swore under oath to the Steele dossier claim that Trump and Putin were in a “conspiracy of cooperation.”
To make Trump look like Putin’s puppet, which is exactly what Clinton wanted, the FBI departed from the most elementary investigative steps, especially the duty to verify information before presenting it to a court. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith (who later pled guilty) altered a document that would have undercut false claims the FBI was making to the FISA court. As the FBI gathered information proving that the allegations it had made to the FISA court were false, it concealed that information from the judges and kept re-alleging the false claims.
There is not a chance that the FBI — or anyone in America — was unaware that the Clinton campaign wanted Trump to be seen as a Russian operative. But the bureau expected Clinton to be the next president. That was her Trump strategy, so it became the FBI’s Trump strategy.