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Documents released by President Donald Trump’s intelligence agencies have revealed damning details about the fabricated foundation and aggressive execution of the Russian collusion investigation that targeted Trump and his allies.
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But the records have also revealed insights into the politically sensitive investigations that never got off the ground.
From credible allegations of corruption at the Clinton Foundation to leaks of classified information to the media, evidence that possibly implicated Democrats or their allies languished at the FBI and Justice Department during Trump’s first administration and former President Joe Biden’s term. The stark difference between the DOJ’s relentless pursuit of Trump from 2016 to 2024 and its reluctance to pursue other targets has alarmed the agency’s critics.
“During the Biden administration, the Justice Department worked as his private attorneys,” Judicial Watch senior investigator Sean Dunagan told the Washington Examiner. “Even if one wants to avoid the phrase ‘deep state,’ there certainly is an administrative state, and the DOJ served to protect and ignore evidence and slow-walk investigations and close investigations into people who were close to that power establishment.
“It’s not how the DOJ is supposed to operate. It was highly selective in who they investigated and how.”
The uneven approach to law enforcement began before Biden took office, however. Under Trump’s first administration, when the Russia investigation effectively sidelined the leaders Trump chose to oversee his Justice Department and intelligence agencies, sensitive investigations also stalled.
“You didn’t have people with the strong backbone in political leadership at the Justice Department and intelligence community early on in Trump 1.0, and I think you saw a paralysis of political leadership that weren’t really willing to call a spade a spade for what was obviously weaponized or deep-state actors,” Oversight Project chief counsel Kyle Brosnan told the Washington Examiner. “Now, I think you have the benefit of more experience, the benefit of people recognizing that, first of all, the deep state exists and is a massive problem, [and] that law enforcement has largely become weaponized, by not only sort of career bureaucrats but also by political leadership.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi has said restoring the public’s trust in the DOJ after nearly a decade of high-profile political investigations is among her top priorities. FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe have all released declassified documents that shed light not only on the aggression of the federal government’s tactics against Trump, but on the efforts top officials made to ensure investigations into his enemies did not proceed.
A top foe’s alleged leaking
Few Democrats gained as much professionally from the Russia saga as Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA). As the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee at the time, he spent years insisting that intelligence agencies had substantial evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Schiff frequently implied that, as a member of the key intelligence committee, he had seen classified information proving a vast conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin.
Documents made public by the FBI last month suggest Schiff may have also been leaking any classified information he could find that advanced the ultimately debunked collusion narrative.
Known as FBI 302s, the records contain notes from multiple interviews FBI agents conducted with a Democratic whistleblower from the House Intelligence Committee who said Schiff believed Trump’s election was a “constitutional crisis” that he would try to fix by driving a Russia scandal he hoped would lead to Trump’s removal.
The whistleblower first told the FBI about Schiff’s alleged leaking in August 2017 and December 2017, the documents show.
RUSSIAGATE DEFINITIVE TIMELINE: HOW NEW INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS FIT IN
At a meeting with members of his staff in 2017, Schiff told the aides they “would leak classified information which was derogatory to President of the United States Donald J. TRUMP,” the whistleblower told the FBI again in 2023.
DOJ officials even invited the whistleblower to participate in a mock grand jury hearing as the Justice Department weighed criminal charges against Schiff. However, the whistleblower “was eventually informed that the issue would not be investigated further by the DOJ,” according to an FBI document from June 2023.
The FBI had reason to believe, at the time, that the whistleblower was credible. In October 2017, after FBI officials had spoken to the whistleblower once already but before agents conducted their additional interviews, a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee reached out to the FBI to report that the whistleblower had been “suddenly fired due to a perceived lack of party loyalty.” That staffer also told the FBI about the leaking scheme, which the staffer said involved Schiff’s aides running notes to him at an unspecified location and Schiff deciding, at that point, who would leak the information.
While the FBI documents do not describe where the note-running operation took place, the whistleblower repeatedly said Schiff insisted that he was protected from prosecution by laws that shield lawmakers from legal consequences for things they say and do on the floor of the House.
Shortly after Trump took office, Democratic staffers on the House Intelligence Committee were asked to work their contacts throughout the intelligence community for any Russia-related information that could be damaging to Trump, including information related to Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, the whistleblower told the FBI during several interviews he gave over the course of several years.
One way the committee members and aides got their hands on classified information was by going to a “read-room” set up by intelligence officials at the headquarters of an intelligence agency whose name was redacted. After viewing classified documents in the read-room, the committee’s “Russia team … would immediately compose summaries on a standalone computer” back at their committee offices on Capitol Hill.
The whistleblower described one incident in which officials from another redacted intelligence agency “descended upon” the committee’s offices and threatened to cut off access to classified records over the leak of information from a “particularly sensitive document.” Schiff, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), and a “small contingent of staff” reviewed the document. Less than 24 hours later, “the information appeared in the news almost verbatim.”
But the FBI during Trump’s first term and, later, during Biden’s presidency, appeared to do little with the evidence agents had gathered. The Schiff leaking investigation was closed six years after the whistleblower first approached the bureau, and Schiff never faced consequences over leaks that appeared to originate from his committee.
“It’s hard to imagine a good justification, a legitimate justification for the FBI not caring that properly classified intelligence information was being leaked,” Dunagan said. “And so it’s speculation on my part as to why they chose not to take that up, but I think the implication is clear that people making those decisions at the FBI were perfectly happy to have information leaked, classified or not, if it was perceived as injurious to Trump.”
Unmaskers were never fully unmasked
Flynn resigned from his national security adviser post on Feb. 13, 2017, after less than a month on the job, thanks to leaks that suggested he had issued misleading public statements about a call he had with the then-Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the transition in December 2016.
But records recently made public by the FBI show that agents were quietly investigating who shared that information with the press, even as other FBI agents built what would become a separate case against Flynn for lying to the FBI.
The FBI investigation into who leaked the contents of Flynn’s phone call, which intelligence agencies gathered by spying on the Russian ambassador’s communications and then “unmasking” Flynn’s identity in transcripts of the call, was closed in 2020 without holding anyone accountable. Surveillance laws require that the identities of Americans who are communicating with the foreign targets of spying must remain concealed, or masked, unless intelligence officials have a compelling reason to request their identity. Only officials with a specific need to know the identity of the American communicating with the foreign surveillance target are permitted to request it.
But the FBI eventually concluded that so many people had access to the highly sensitive details of Flynn’s unmasked phone calls that it was impossible to identify any suspects.
“The subject pool is larger in scope than initially understood at the onset of the investigation, which is comprised of over 167 individuals,” the FBI noted in a recently released memorandum composed in December 2020.
In May 2020, Richard Grenell, who was then the acting director of national intelligence, declassified a list of people who had requested to unmask Flynn’s identity. The first person to make a request was Samantha Power, who, at the time, in November 2016, was President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Power later claimed during a congressional interview that she did not know what the term unmasking even meant.
Others included John Brennan, then Obama’s CIA director, and James Comey, then the FBI director. But the list also included Obama administration officials who had seemingly little connection to any intelligence activity, such as the then-deputy energy secretary and at least six officials from the Treasury Department.
Yet the only person charged in the Flynn saga was Flynn himself. In 2017, Justice Department officials said he denied discussing sanctions with the Russian ambassador during the phone call when the unmasked transcript showed otherwise.
More than three years later, the FBI concluded that it could not do any further digging into who leaked the phone call because too many top officials were having too many conversations with reporters at the time of the leak. Unlike in the Russia investigation, when FBI agents used the most intrusive methods available on Trump campaign advisers despite not having evidence of a crime, the FBI decided in the unmasking and leaking investigation that it would not resort to any intrusive investigative tactics.
“Because of the senior position of most of the prioritized subject pool, many had official purposes for contacting the media as part of their job duties,” the FBI concluded. “Without sufficient probable cause to pursue additional legal process, it is impossible to determine if the nature of the media contact was legitimate or nefarious. Without any additional derogatory information to narrow down a target, the FBI was unable to pursue more intrusive legal process to attempt to verify the substance of each contact.”
Clinton Foundation investigation shuttered
FBI agents and federal prosecutors discussed the prospect of opening an investigation into Clinton Foundation dealings as early as fall 2015, according to a memo that the FBI shared with Just the News in August.
But by February 2016, DOJ officials were already signaling to the FBI agents looking into corruption allegations that they were not interested in moving forward with the case.
Before FBI and DOJ leadership successfully shut it down, the investigation had become a sprawling look at whether Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, used the State Department to offer preferential treatment to Clinton Foundation donors. FBI field offices in New York, Washington, and Little Rock, Arkansas, had each begun reviewing evidence.
In August 2016, according to the memo, the field office investigations were ordered by FBI leadership to be consolidated into just one at the New York field office. Just a few weeks later, prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York’s office and the Southern District of New York’s office were already signaling they did not want to move forward with the case.
The FBI even collected evidence from a recording made by a cooperating witness who spoke with a Clinton Foundation associate that agents believed bolstered their case.
However, leaks to the Wall Street Journal in November 2016, just days before the election, suggested that the DOJ viewed the recorded conversation as “worthless hearsay.”
But those same DOJ leaders advanced the Russian collusion investigation, which began around the time the Clinton Foundation and other Clinton-related inquiries were shut down, based solely on far less credible hearsay, a fact that then-special counsel John Durham criticized at length in his 2023 report about the anti-Trump bias that fueled the start of the collusion investigation.
In early 2017 and into that summer, once Trump had taken office and the election was over, the FBI agents working the case still could not find a U.S. attorney willing to move the case forward, and top DOJ officials withheld their permission for any additional steps to be taken.
Statute of limitations dilemmas
The DOJ under Trump is now investigating the alleged conspiracies at the heart of the Russian collusion investigation, looking into whether law enforcement was intentionally weaponized against Trump and his allies starting in 2016, as documents released by his administration suggest.
For those and other smothered investigations, however, many possible prosecutions will run into issues with the statute of limitations.
That should not stop these investigations from proceeding, Dunagan said.
“One of the prime reasons that we enforce laws is to encourage other people to obey the law,” he said. “So if those investigations are just allowed to die on the vine and not be reopened because they’re politically difficult and there’s a political cost and they’re going up against some very powerful people, you know, that’s not a good reason.”
Dunagan said Congress could aggressively investigate where the DOJ is time-barred from doing so.
In some cases, the FBI appears to be moving quickly on investigations that stalled under Biden.
Agents raided the home of former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, for example, as part of a classified document investigation that the Biden DOJ once closed. Under then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, the DOJ closed the criminal investigation into whether Bolton shared classified information in his book, The Room Where It Happened, in 2021 after the Trump DOJ opened it the year before.
FBI SEIZED HARD DRIVES AND ‘TRUMP’-LABELED BINDERS FROM JOHN BOLTON’S HOME
However, according to a report last month in the New York Times, the Bolton investigation again “began to pick up momentum during the Biden administration” after intelligence agencies discovered some of Bolton’s emails that contained classified information on the servers of an adversarial country’s spy service. Bolton sent the emails to people who were helping him prepare materials for his book, according to the report, although the classified information in the emails did not ultimately appear in the memoir.
FBI agents did not take the step of collecting Bolton’s electronic devices to see if they contained the same emails obtained by the adversarial country, which would authenticate the emails and likely heighten the stakes of the case, until months into Trump’s term.