Tag: russiagate

FBI Never Investigated Evidence For Obama AG’s Role In Clinton Email Coverup

The FBI never investigated explosive allegations that Attorney General Loretta Lynch coordinated with the Clinton campaign to suppress Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal. Those allegations stem from a secret Russian intelligence memo that circulated inside the U.S. government in 2016. The memo was so concerning that it pushed FBI Director James Comey to break ranks with Lynch during the Clinton email probe. Now, thanks to the newly released appendix of Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, that memo is public, and it appears to confirm long-held suspicions about how the Clinton investigation was handled.

Some of the same intelligence recently appeared in the “Clinton annex” released by Sen. Chuck Grassley on July 21, but the newly released Durham Appendix provides a more comprehensive account of this intelligence stream, tracing it from early allegations involving Lynch through to the later scheme to frame Donald Trump as a Russian agent.

While much attention has focused on the Clinton plan to smear Trump, the alleged coordination between Lynch and the Clinton campaign to suppress the email server scandal has so far received less scrutiny.

The intelligence detailed in both the Clinton annex and the Durham Appendix originated from Russian sources who had hacked various government and private entities, including the Open Society Foundations, formerly the Soros Foundation. This intelligence was based on intercepted communications among senior Open Society official Leonard Benardo, fellow foundation figure Jeffrey Goldstein, and then-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The intelligence was considered significant enough to be briefed directly to President Obama and credible enough that Comey regarded it as “one brick in the load,” leading him to effectively sideline his boss, Attorney General Lynch, and bypass the Justice Department when announcing that no charges would be brought against Clinton.

Durham’s report acknowledges that while some of the phrasing in the intelligence may have suffered from translation issues or conflation, intelligence officials deemed it to be authentic.

According to one of the newly released memos, in a Jan. 12, 2016 conversation with Goldstein, Wasserman Schultz revealed that the Obama White House was applying pressure on Comey via Lynch to shut down the email investigation because the scandal was damaging the Democratic Party and threatening Obama’s legacy:

“Obama has no intention to darken the final part of his presidency and ‘legacy’ by the scandal surrounding the main contender from the DP [Democratic Party]. To solve the problem, the President puts pressure on FBI Director James Comey through Attorney General Lynch, however, so far without concrete results.”

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No Doubt Left… Russiagate Was A Cover-Up

The most infuriatingly complex scandal of all time has just been reduced to a page or two, thanks to another declassified release…

It was a cover-up.

The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time. It even has multiple names thanks to its peculiar chronology. From 2016 until April 2019 — while Democrats still held out hope of “presidency-wrecking” revelations that would topple Donald Trump — it was generally known as the Trump-Russia scandal. After Special Counsel Robert Mueller broke the hearts of MSNBC audiences by issuing a report without new indictments, attention began to be cast on the scandal’s fraudulent construction, how it was propped up by political spying, illegal leaks, and WMD-style intelligence fakery. Trump and others began to call it Spygate or the Russia hoax, but the name that stuck was Russiagate.

Those of us who covered the story from the start had a difficult time explaining to audiences what it was, as we ourselves didn’t know. Now we do, after a month of disclosures, capped yesterday by the release of an explosive (and inexplicably long-classified) annex to the report of Special Counsel John Durham. Finally, it seems, we can explain how the idea that Donald Trump was “gaffing his way toward treason” through a secret love affair (really!) with Vladimir Putin and extensive “ties” or “links” with Russia suddenly became The Biggest Story in the World in the summer of 2016.

It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story, probably the last in a long line, as neither Bill nor Hillary will have careers when it’s finished, if they stay out of jail. Characteristically, the most powerful political family since the Kennedys won’t just bring many individuals down with them, but whole institutions, as the FBI, the CIA, the presidency of Barack Obama, and a dozen or so of the most celebrated brands in commercial media will see their names blackened forever through association with this idiotic caper. A fair number of those media companies should (and likely will) go out of business.

Now, we know. With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes.

One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme. The last stage required the enthusiastic cooperation and canine incuriosity of the entire commercial news business, which cheered as conspirators made an enforcement target of Trump, actually an irrelevant bystander.

I’ve tiptoed for years around what I believed to be true about this case, worrying some mitigating fact might emerge.

Now, there’s no doubt.

Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it. It was a cover-up, plain and simple…

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A Grand Jury Investigation Into the Russia Hoax Has Been Ordered

Attorney General Pam Bondi has reportedly signed an order to launch a grand jury investigation into the origins and promotion of the Russia hoax by former President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CIA Director John Brennan, DNI James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey and more. 

The investigation comes after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a number of declassified documents showing President Barack Obama ordered a December 2016 meeting to discuss the so-called “collusion” between then candidate Donald Trump and the Russian government to win the presidential election. That claim – which was made up by the DNC and Clinton campaign to distract from Hillary’s criminal mishandling of classified information on a personal email server – was then taken by CIA Director Brennan, the FBI and others in the intelligence community and codified in an official January 2017 intelligence. 

“New evidence has emerged of the most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history. Per President @realDonaldTrump‘s directive, I have declassified a @HouseIntel oversight majority staff report that exposes how the Obama Administration manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election. In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people, working with their partners in the media to promote the lie, in order to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, essentially enacting a years-long coup against him,” Gabbard detailed. 

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Here’s What Gabbard’s Russiagate Report Missed

“An easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia — from a position of strength — is possible. Common sense says this cycle of hostility must end.” Candidate Donald Trump said that on April 27, 2016. At first glance that might sound rather irrelevant to Gabbard’s Russiagate revelations. But let me connect the dots for you.

The first point is that Russiagate has inflamed US-Russia tensions. That action actually had a number of beneficiaries. Their interests would be harmed by Trump’s aspiration.

Who are they? Primarily I’m talking about the US defense industry and those connected in some way. Certainly a strong defensive capability is of vital importance. But the demand for defense production becomes inflated by provocations like Russiagate. However, such demand is not essential for a strong defense posture.

It is natural behavior for an industry to try to protect itself and to grow. That means the defense industry would be receptive to provoked demand. And there is evidence that many American politicians would be motivated to support that unnecessary production. Here’s why. First, if there were no politically provoked demand there would be a lesser need for defense production. Congressional district and state economies could be negatively impacted by fewer defense contracts, there would be fewer jobs, out of work people would spend less money thus impacting local economies, there might be fewer revolving-door opportunities for politicians leaving government service, and there could be fewer campaign contributions, free trips including foreign visits, and a reduction in other favors provided to politicians (such as supporting pet charities or projects of a politician).

In short, a peace dividend from better US-Russia relations would be felt quite negatively by the foregoing. And that’s where my cited Trump quote favoring better relations with Russia connects. His aspiration runs counter to certain political interests by compromising them.

Perhaps that’s why just 36 days after Trump’s cited aspirational statement, Hillary Clinton said, “If Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin. We cannot let that happen.”

Now, I don’t think she meant literally celebrating like a birthday party. Being very happy might fit the metaphor.

But why wouldn’t both countries be happy over the advent of better relations? Certainly that was the case back when President Ronald Reagan made friends with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. For comparison, wouldn’t the US administration be happy if it convinced the leadership of Iran to honestly seek better relations with us?

Countries enjoying solidly good relations generally don’t fight each other directly or by surrogacy.

So this is what Gabbard’s reports missed: They omitted the greater context concerning the benefits for some from undertaking the Russiagate hoax. Gabbard makes it sound simply like a big untoward political squabble. She missed the point that it is within some commercial interests to vilify Russia as did Russiagate.

Her reports expose the political culprits responsible for the hoax. But they ignore that greater context in which they did it. And that context is far more consequential than the political angle that has dominated the Gabbard news story. Even putting Obama in jail, as some have mused about, wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem.

There are real problems created by those who benefit from conflict in the world. Those problems are inextricably related to the onset of the Russiagate hoax. All the perpetrators of the hoax may not have been astute enough to realize that. Yet it remains at the heart of the matter.

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Everything Damaging To Democrats Is ‘Russian Disinformation’ To The Media

There’s a reliable pattern: Whenever something truly devastating to Democrats comes to light, the dying news media will immediately call it “Russian disinformation,” even when the goods are 1,000 percent real; the latest being newly declassified documents this week with yet more evidence indicating that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign planned to smear Trump by connecting him to Russia — the basis of the completely fabricated Russia-Trump collusion hoax that ultimately framed President Trump and his associates with crimes they didn’t commit.

An alternate reality exists wherein the New York Times assesses the new details and concludes that one of the country’s major political parties engaged in some truly corrupt, sinister conduct, and perhaps there might be avenues to pursue legal accountability. Unfortunately, we live in this reality where the Times runs the headline, “‘Clinton Plan’ Emails Were Likely Made by Russian Spies, Declassified Report Shows,” a naked attempt to dismiss what the new information actually shows.

Senate Republicans on Thursday declassified a portion of a special counsel report that included purported communications involving the 2016 Clinton campaign and a left-wing non-profit group, which suggest the parties plotted to implicate Trump and his campaign in Russian election interference. The best part of the article, authored by Times reporters Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman, is when they brush annex revelations aside, essentially because Durham couldn’t locate the originals of a couple of emails.

Pack it up guys! Nothing to see here!

That’s not an exaggeration. “[U]ltimately, in weighing all the evidence,” the article said, “[Special Counsel John] Durham concluded that the Russians had probably faked the key emails…” But that’s not true. The immediate paragraph thereafter quotes a line included in the annex documents that literally says Duram’s office assessed the emails in question to be “a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based Think Tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment, and others.” As The Federalist’s Elle Purnell noted, that’s “obviously not the same thing as saying he thought the Russians completely made them up.”

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Don’t Believe The Lies From NYT Russia Hoaxers About The Durham Annex

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.”

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Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election post-mortem confirms plan to smear Trump with Russia, like intel

Newly declassified evidence shows the FBI was alerted to intelligence in 2016 indicating Hillary Clinton planned to smear then-candidate Donald Trump by linking him to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and then bureau leaders played right into the campaign’s strategy by conducting a sweeping investigation into false claims of Trump-Russia collusion.

Now a major question hovers over the Justice Department strike force set up by Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the affair: was it just a political dirty trick or did it rise to the level of a criminal conspiracy?

Clinton’s own words in a 2016 election post-mortem are likely to be key to investigators. 

Public records show Clinton herself, in coordination with her campaign general counsel Marc Elias, campaign manager Robby Mook, campaign chairman John Podesta, campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri, campaign policy adviser Jake Sullivan, and others launched an effort to link Trump to Putin as the 2016 battle for the White House raged.

Newly declassified evidence dubbed the “Clinton Plan intelligence” included purported intercepted communications from a George Soros ally suggesting that Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Trump was plotting an effort to demonize the Republican nominee by connecting him to Putin, and that the Clinton campaign expected the FBI would put more fuel on the fire.

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What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?

This May 16, 2016, quote from Nancy Pelosi has haunted me:

“Donald Trump is not going to be President of the United States. Take it to the bank, I guarantee it.”

All these years, I’ve wondered, how could she be so certain?  This wasn’t just the usual campaign hyperbole. Her phrasing was a simple noun-verb construction, nakedly declarative, and absolutely certain. She left herself absolutely no wiggle room for later, just in case. Seasoned politicians don’t do that sort of thing typically, and Nancy Pelosi is most definitely seasoned. So why??  Why do it?

We may have gotten our answer.

The long-classified annex from the Durham report was declassified this Thursday. What it tells us is that the clock, as it were, on when the organizational malfeasance — the coup — against Donald Trump began may have to be ratcheted back months.

Down at the bottom of the now-declassified page in this X post is a paragraph from hacked emails the Russians had exfiltrated in March of 2016:

…The Clinton staff, with support from special services is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and ‘The Russian Mafia.’  Currently, they are studying his connections…

Ironically, these are the first actual Russian-hacked emails we have proof of after all these years! As you may recall, the DNC “hack” has never been proven, as the FBI has never examined the hard drives.

The internet is now speculating what “special services” means, but I know what I read it to mean, in the context (you’ll see it in a moment) of the entire document:  the FBI. 

Now, where did this information come from? Whose hacked email are we talking about?

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DOJ Official Who Approved $2 Million Payout To Disgraced Russia Hoaxers Identified As Left-Wing Activist Brian Netter

The Department of Justice official who signed off on $2 million in taxpayer-funded payments to disgraced Russia collusion hoax participants left the Department of Justice to help lead the “legal resistance” to President Donald Trump and other duly-elected Republicans, new records reviewed exclusively by The Federalist reveal.

FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, sued the Department of Justice over the release of messages detailing their role in pushing the Clinton campaign’s Russia collusion hoax. They said the release of the messages that were written using government resources violated their privacy. The Biden administration rewarded the duo with lucrative payouts. Strozk received $1.2 million in taxpayer funds while Page received an $800,000 settlement.

“[W]e have identified Brian Netter, Deputy Assistant Attorney General as the individual that approved the settlement agreements,” a DOJ official told the Center to Advance Security in America, which had filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2024, when the payouts were publicly announced. Netter was the deputy assistant attorney general for the Federal Programs Branch during the term of President Joe Biden.

Netter currently serves as the legal director at Democracy Forward, a Democrat Party-affiliated group launched in 2017 to fight President Trump with lawfare. The group brags that it took Trump to court more than 100 times in his first term in office. It has continued its use of the courts to win political battles into his second term in office. “Liberal Legal Group Positions Itself as a Top Trump Administration Foe,” touted The New York Times last November.

Marc Elias, the attorney known for his work damaging the integrity of both the 2016 and 2020 elections, chairs the board of Democracy Forward. Elias, as the Clinton campaign general counsel, signed the checks for her campaign’s Russia collusion hoax. To hide the Russia collusion hoax’s origins, the funding was fraudulently run through Elias’s law firm as “legal services.” Clinton was fined only $113,000 for the false claims she made to hide her role. Elias also ran Democrats’ legal effort to destabilize the 2020 elections with the sudden expansion of unsupervised mail-in balloting operations staffed by Democrat-run nonprofit groups.

Other current and recent board members of Netter’s group include former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, former Biden Chief of Staff Ronald Klain, Kamala Harris’ sister Maya Harris, and former leader of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Mindy Myers.

Netter worked for Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice from 2021 through early 2025. He opposed then-former President Trump’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block National Archives releases to the January 6 committee, a lawfare committee comprised only of members appointed by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

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Kash Patel Issues Threat as Corporate Media Lies About Russia Collusion Hoax: “Maybe This FBI Will Release More Docs Directly From FBI HQ So We Can See Who is Lying…And Then…”

FBI Director Kash Patel just threatened to call the corporate media’s bluff dramatically on Saturday as the fallout over the Russian Collusion Hoax continues.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, Patel found thousands of Russia collusion hoax documents in “burn bags” in a secret room at the FBI earlier this week.

One of the documents in the burn bags was the classified annex to the John Durham report, which included the underlying intelligence he investigated. Patel and his team of investigators also discovered a “previously undisclosed” SCIF at the FBI headquarters.

In a post on X, Patel noted that he had previously proved that the Steele Dossier was completely disinformation and that he had been called a liar after exposing the truth.

“In 2017/18, I proved the Steele Dossier was fictitious intelligence, weaponized by corrupt FBI officials to deceive a federal judge and unlawfully spy on then presidential candidate Trump’s campaign- all paid for by his opponent,” Patel wrote on X. “The media called me a liar.”

“Now I’m the FBI Director: We just uncovered burn bags/room filled with hidden Russia Gate files, including the Durham annex, and declassified them,” he continued. “Once again, I released the prior FBI’s own documents and exposed the truth.”

Patel then said he would put all his cards on the table, calling the media out on their garbage ‘reporting’ and sending the following threat.

“The same media is calling me a liar again,” he said. “Maybe this FBI will release more docs directly, from FBI HQ so we can see who is lying- wouldn’t want to deprive the fake news of more bogus Pulitzers.”

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