It’s beginning to look like the Obama administration was all-in on the Russia collusion hoax long before Trump won the 2016 election.
On Monday, Fox News reported that before the FBI ever launched its politicized probe of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies had “credible foreign sources” indicating the FBI would help spread the Russia collusion hoax, which of course is exactly what happened.
It’s the latest twist in a string of shocking new revelations about how the U.S. intelligence community, at the behest of then-President Barack Obama, manufactured and disseminated a false narrative that Moscow was working to get Trump elected in 2016.
The “credible foreign sources” that predicted the FBI would run an intelligence operation against Trump in the summer of 2016 were almost certainly Russian sources. Back in September of 2020, my colleagues Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway reported that then-Director of National Intelligence (now CIA director) John Ratcliffe told congressional officials that top U.S. intelligence officials knew that Moscow was aware of Hillary Clinton’s campaign plan to accuse Trump of being a Russian asset.
Former CIA Director John Brennan, said Ratcliffe, personally briefed then-President Obama and top U.S. national security officials that Moscow had determined Clinton had approved a plan in late July 2016, “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to Brennan’s own handwritten notes.
In September of that year, former FBI Director James Comey was sent an investigative referral regarding Moscow’s alleged knowledge of Clinton’s plans to paint Trump as a treasonous Russian agent. But instead of investigating whether the Clinton campaign had been infiltrated by Russian intelligence, Comey went about obtaining federal warrants to spy on Trump’s campaign.
What’s more, we know that Christopher Steele, whose infamous dossier wound up being a key source for the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that falsely claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” for Trump to win the election, was at the time on the payroll of sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. And his primary subsource for the dossier, Igor Danchenko, was long suspected of being a Russian intelligence asset.
All of which helps shed light on what was reported Monday. Ratcliffe, according to Fox News, is going to declassify the underlying intelligence that reveals that “credible foreign sources” knew about the FBI’s plans to promote the Trump-Russia narrative. Part of that intelligence is a classified annex in former Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe.
Fox News quoted an anonymous source familiar with the contents of the annex who said that the intelligence collected from these foreign sources predicted the FBI’s next move, in the summer of 2016, “with alarming specificity.”
“Ultimately, the release of the classified annex 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,” the source told Fox News.
Together with what we now know about Obama’s involvement in all of this, especially after Trump had won the election, it looks very much like what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called it last week: a treasonous conspiracy and a years-long coup against a duly elected president.
In particular, as my colleague Margot Cleveland reported in these pages yesterday, the extent of Obama’s personal involvement is deeper than previously reported. Last week’s release of the House Permanent Selection Committee on Intelligence’s (HPSCI) report summarizing its investigation into the drafting of the ICA exposed how then-CIA Director Brennan ordered the publication of three substandard intelligence reports. These reports, together with the Steele dossier, “became foundational sources for the ICA judgments that Putin preferred Trump over Clinton.”
But as Cleveland notes, the recently declassified HPSCI report also reveals Obama’s central role in this scheme. Investigators and the ICA authors were “denied access to a trove of information on grounds of executive or congressional privilege,” according to the HPSCI report. One FBI analyst, the report says, argued that this intelligence should be shared with those responsible for drafting the ICA, but the Obama administration “denied ICA drafters access to this intelligence on grounds of Executive or Congressional privilege.”
Setting aside what intelligence might have been protected by congressional privilege, executive privilege rests with the president, which means Obama is the one who barred the ICA drafters from seeing the underlying intelligence.
Why would he do that? To prevent them from seeing that it was laughably unreliable — indeed, that much of it relied on the outlandish Steele dossier. Indeed, the “compartmented” version of the ICA — that is, the version only accessible to specially identified and approved individuals — included the Steele dossier. But the public and even classified versions did not. Why would the Steele dossier be compartmented? As Cleveland explained, “to keep the honest analysts responsible for finalizing the classified and unclassified version of the ICA from discovering the shady and fake intel Brennan buried in the compartmented version.”
A big part of what we’re learning now is the lengths some of these intelligence officials went to hide what they had done. That’s why much of this didn’t come out during Trump’s first term — some of the people who were involved in it continued to serve in the Trump administration — and worked to cover their tracks.
For example, Gina Haspel, who served as CIA director under Trump, personally blocked the declassification of Russiagate documents in 2020. Why would she do that? Well, Haspel was hand-picked by Brennan to serve as CIA station chief in London from 2014 to early 2017 — the same time that Steele, a British national, was in London compiling his garbage dossier on Trump. Haspel was the CIA’s link between London and Washington during this period.
Over the weekend, Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer suggested Haspel should be investigated for her potential role in the Russia collusion hoax. “What role did she play not only in perhaps creating this, but what role did she play in suppressing it when she was CIA director and she was supposed to be serving Donald Trump rather than the CIA establishment?” Schweizer said. “She certainly had access to this material.”
At this point, that’s really the question that should determine who gets investigated: who had access to this material? We know that Obama and his intel chiefs had access to material in the summer of 2016 that suggested Moscow knew that Clinton was going to try to smear Trump as a Russian asset, and that Moscow believed the FBI would go along with that. We know that they did indeed go along with it, and that they cooked up the ICA after Trump won, hiding their reliance on the Steele dossier and other unreliable and outlandish intelligence products.
We know all this now, eight years after the treasonous conspiracy was launched, and soon we’ll know more, as Ratcliffe and Gabbard release more. The question is, will anyone in the Trump administration do anything about it?