CIA Director John Ratcliffe said on Sunday that the agency would declassify additional documents showing that the FBI actively worked to amplify the Steele dossier and bury Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the Russia collusion hoax.
Speaking on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Ratcliffe said that an additional batch of declassified documents would be released.
“What hasn’t come out yet and what’s going to come out is the underlying intelligence that I have spent the last few months making recommendations about final declassification and sent that to the Department of Justice that will come out in the John Durham Report Classified Annex,” Ratcliffe said. “And what that intelligence shows, Maria, is that part of this was a Hillary Clinton plan, but part of it was an FBI plan to be an accelerant to that fake Steele dossier, to those fake Russia collusion claims by pouring oil on the fire, by amplifying the lie and burying the truth of what … Hillary Clinton was up to.”
Ratcliffe also added that “much” of the testimony from then-CIA Director John Brennan, Clinton, and former FBI Director James Comey was “completely inconsistent with what our underlying intelligence that is about to be declassified in the Durham Annex, what that reflects.”
Fox News’ Brooke Singman reported on Monday that “U.S. intelligence had credible foreign sources indicating that the FBI would play a role in spreading the salacious Trump-Russia collusion narrative — before the bureau ever launched its controversial Crossfire Hurricane probe.”
An anonymous source also told Singman that the release of additional documents “will lend more credibility to the assertion that there was a coordinated plan inside the U.S. government to help the Clinton campaign stir up controversy connecting Trump to Russia.”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified a 2020 report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence showing that members of the intelligence community were concerned with several aspects of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that was the heart of the Russia collusion hoax.
The declassified report shows that intelligence analysts and operations officers were concerned about the infamous Steele dossier’s inclusion in the ICA on Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump. The research — compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele — was then pushed as credible and later included in the ICA despite concerns from members of the intelligence community.
According to the now declassified report, however, members of the intelligence community “struggled to explain how the ICA … could have included dossier information without identifying and vetting primary sources and without explaining the political circumstances surrounding why the report was produced and funded.”
Nonetheless, the dossier was added to the ICA.
Notably, three days after the Clinton campaign successfully shopped the phony-information operation to the FBI, the agency began investigating the Trump campaign in what became known as “Crossfire Hurricane.”
But documents obtained by The Federalist and reported on by Shawn Fleetwood show that Steele, during a 2017 interview with the FBI, acknowledged his opposition research relied largely on claims from a “primary subsource.” Steele, according to documents reviewed by The Federalist, told the FBI officials that the source “is a US resident” and a “native Russian.” (Russian national Igor Danchenko was afterward revealed to be the primary subsource. As explained by The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland, Danchenko was indicted in 2021 for “making false statements to the FBI” and was “alleged to have invented some of the supposed intel contained in the dossier.” Danchenko was later acquitted on charges of lying to the FBI.)
Despite the fact that the dossier was not verified, the FBI used the discredited Steele dossier as the basis for obtaining several Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe admitting as much.
From there the propaganda press, Democrats, and intelligence community officials peddled the bogus claim that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
But Special Counsel Robert Mueller later found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia. Special Counsel Durham later released a report in 2023 vindicating Trump and others who insisted the FBI acted improperly in its investigation. Durham’s report found there was no evidentiary basis for the anti-Trump probe.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2