New documents shedding light on the Trump-Russia collusion hoax dropped Thursday, and the corporate media are still running cover for the same chicanery they helped launder back in 2016. Especially dishonest is the spin from Russia hoax handmaiden Charlie Savage of The New York Times, who falsely claimed Thursday night that the previously classified annex to the Durham report said something it never actually said.
The 29-page annex is a byproduct of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the decision by Barack Obama’s intelligence agencies to investigate then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016, based in part on a collection of falsehoods commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign known as the Steele dossier. In his report, released in 2023, Durham found the FBI lacked justification for investigating Trump and spying on his campaign.
He also found that the Obama intel agencies had been made aware of intelligence suggesting Hillary Clinton planned “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference” by the Russians. In 2016, the Clinton campaign’s law firm commissioned the Steele dossier, which included salacious lies about Trump and Russia, and shopped it to the FBI, which then launched the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump. In his report, Durham blasted the agencies for falling for allegations of Trump-Russia collusion despite their foreknowledge that it could be a Clinton-engineered hoax.
The annex released Thursday includes Russian intelligence memos obtained by U.S. agencies that evidence Durham’s suspicion that Clinton had approved a plan to smear Trump. The Russians claimed to have obtained several emails from Soros executive Leonard Benardo, one of which said that “HRC [Clinton] approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections.”