How Trump's Own Appointees Aided Russiagate Plot Against Him
Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations,
When Obama administration officials manufactured U.S. intelligence tying Donald Trump to Moscow following his stunning 2016 victory, they had no idea Trump’s own political appointees would help them undermine Trump’s presidency – and his chances of reelection in 2020.
RCI’s review of recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews with former Trump officials reveals for the first time how key members of Trump’s cabinet and other appointees during his first term shrouded the previous administration’s machinations and either deliberately or inadvertently misled the public into thinking the fake Russiagate intelligence was real.
Former Special Counsel John Durham, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former CIA Director Gina Haspel dismissed or buried evidence that cast doubt on a foundational document of the Russigate hoax – the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) prepared in the waning days of the Obama administration.
Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General William Barr, stopped the declassification and release of key exculpatory evidence debunking the ICA on the eve of the 2020 election, which has not been reported previously.
The ICA helped frame the false narrative, which led to multiple espionage investigations that dogged Trump throughout his first term: that Russian President Vladimir Putin had authorized dirty tricks to help Trump win the 2016 election. A 2018 government review of that document, which was chiefly prepared by Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and his National Intelligence Director James Clapper, found that its most explosive claims were based on “one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard [intelligence] reports,” according to a recently declassified report that Trump administration and, later, Biden administration officials had helped keep locked away in a CIA vault. It also cited as supporting intelligence debunked political dirt paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
While these Trump-appointed officials may not have initiated the weaponization of the CIA against Trump, they facilitated it by hiding evidence that exposed the claims that Russia tried to help Trump as a fraud. By obscuring Joe Biden’s own role in perpetrating the hoax, they may have helped Obama’s vice president win the close race for the presidency in 2020.
“The Russiagate betrayal continued in plain sight,” said former Trump national security adviser J.D. Gordon, with some in Trump’s own cabinet letting him twist in the wind instead of daylighting secreted material that would have cleared the clouds of suspicion hanging over his head before the 2020 election.
John Bolton
The suppression can be traced back at least until mid-2018. That’s when Fred Fleitz, who was National Security Adviser John Bolton’s chief of staff, heard that investigators at his former employer, the House Intelligence Committee, were probing the raw intelligence in the ICA supporting the assessment's key judgments.
A one-time CIA analyst himself, Fleitz was curious to learn what they had found during the previous year, interviewing CIA analysts and reviewing secret documents at Langley. So, he traveled to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and read a draft of the highly classified report in a secure room of the U.S. Capitol.
Fleitz told RealClearInvestigations that he was startled to learn that the investigators discovered numerous intelligence documents showing the ICA’s key conclusion – that Russia “developed a clear preference” for Trump and “aspired to help” him win the election – was based on shoddy and fabricated intelligence. House investigators found those assessments were supported in part by the Steele dossier, a series of Clinton campaign-funded reports containing baseless accusations linking Trump to the Kremlin compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
“The ICA misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports,” which were “either proven false or unsubstantiated,” the top-secret congressional analysis noted. “The ICA referred to the dossier as ‘Russian plans and intentions,’ falsely implying that the dossier had intelligence value for understanding Moscow's influence operations.”
Fleitz thought Bolton should be briefed on the unpublished House report, which undermined the prevailing narrative that Trump and Moscow had colluded during the 2016 election campaign. When he returned to his West Wing office, Fleitz sat down at his classified computer and wrote a synopsis of the review and gave it to his boss.
But Bolton did not, in turn, brief the president. “He didn’t do anything with it. He never told Trump, and I never heard anything about it again,” Fleitz told RCI.
If Trump had known about the shocking revelations from the classified report, Fleitz said, he could have used them to remove the cloud of suspicion hanging over his presidency concerning Russia.
Bolton – who is facing unrelated criminal charges for mishandling other classified documents – and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.
Mike Pompeo
What Fleitz did not know at the time was that the CIA was also hindering the House probe of the ICA. As Trump’s first CIA chief, Mike Pompeo was skeptical that his predecessor Brennan had gotten the Russia intelligence assessment as wrong as he was hearing from the autopsy conducted by the House Intelligence Committee. “We showed him a draft but he didn’t believe it. He said we have to be wrong on a lot of this stuff,” said Derek Harvey, who worked as a senior analysis adviser with the House Intelligence Committee from 2017 to 2022.
As a result, he said, “We didn’t get a lot of cooperation from Pompeo.”
Multiple attempts to reach Pompeo by email and phone at his new jobs as senior executive director of the Center for Law & Government at Liberty University in Virginia and adviser to Ukraine’s top defense contractor Fire Point in Kyiv were unsuccessful.
Gina Haspel
Pompeo’s deputy at the time was Gina Haspel, who appears to have played a much more active role in drawing a veil over the information. A veteran CIA official whom Pompeo had put in charge of most of the day-to-day operations of the agency, she apparently didn’t appreciate congressional staffers investigating the agency’s spycraft that went into the highly classified and restricted version of the ICA.
Sources told RCI she made sure the investigators’ on-site examination, which spanned from 2017 to 2020, was closely monitored and tightly controlled. The House investigators had to be cleared into a “read room” at Langley each day to examine the records the CIA used to support the ICA. And they were forced to lock up their laptops and materials there when they left at night.
“Haspel didn’t allow them to take even their notes out of their workspace there,” Harvey said. “They couldn’t take anything out of the building.”
Another House Intelligence Committee source familiar with the operation said the investigators suspected the CIA “was spying on [committee] computers” back on Capitol Hill. They reported back to then-committee chairman Devin Nunes that the CIA had tampered with the computers the agency forced them to use to draft their report inside headquarters – and this was only after they were denied access to any computers in the first four months of their oversight investigation.
“Deliberate technical modifications to the [CIA-issued] computers made the machines unstable and unreliable,” which slowed down investigators’ work, according to a committee report documenting the CIA’s efforts to “obstruct” their probe.
The report, which was obtained by RCI, added: “Peculiar machine glitches caused lines of text to appear fuzzy, forcing restarts to correct and sometimes resulting in lost text or footnotes.”
The investigators repeatedly requested “proper computers” to support the review, but were never provided with them. They were also denied software tools that would have allowed them to efficiently search large volumes of classified and unclassified reporting at the agency. Thousands of pages of intelligence reports relevant to the ICA were available only in paper form. The staffers had to comb through thick binders with broken rings and missing tab dividers, further hamstringing their audit.
Pompeo and Haspel also placed restrictions on their access to Brennan’s five hand-picked authors of the ICA, who initially were kept at arm’s length.
“It took nearly five months for committee staff to be allowed to interview the ICA authors,” the internal report said.
Committee spokeswoman Lesley Byers told RCI, “Just getting interviews with the ICA drafters was a massive battle with the CIA back then, which further makes the point of the extraordinary measures the CIA went through to obstruct the HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] staffers.” She added, “Why obstruct if there was nothing to hide?”
In May 2018, Trump appointed Pompeo as secretary of state and named Haspel as his replacement. Haspel came highly recommended to the job, with the support of many intelligence community veterans, including John Brennan, for whom she worked as London station chief and director of CIA operations. Before her 2018 confirmation hearing, Brennan signed a joint letter with 52 other former intelligence officials expressing his “strong support” for Haspel and arguing she was “an outstanding choice for that position.” He also assured senators she would produce “unbiased intelligence.”
After she took over the CIA, she locked up all drafts of the House Intelligence Committee report in a gun safe inside a vault in a highly secure room at CIA headquarters until she left office in January 2021. She also impounded all the examiners’ notes and other work materials.
“Gina Haspel buried the report,” Harvey said.
Knowledgeable sources say that before Haspel left, she demanded that both Barr and Durham keep the report classified and not release any part of it before the 2020 election.
“In 2020, Gina Haspel was running around with her hair on fire saying it should never see the light of day,” a former senior official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. “I still cannot believe that she was President Trump's CIA director. It’s totally insane.”
Fleitz described her efforts to block such exculpatory information from getting out as “insubordination to a U.S. president.”
Fluent in Russian, Haspel had long been an expert on the Kremlin and staked out hawkish positions that ran counter to many of Trump’s policies dealing with Moscow.
It’s not clear if Haspel contributed to the ICA, but in 2016, she was the CIA’s station chief in London, where she assisted Russiagate investigators, including Peter Strzok. She reportedly approved his travel to London to meet with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who claimed Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos told him the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Haspel was briefed on the matter, which became the basis for the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation targeting several Trump advisers, including Papadopoulos.
Haspel was also in London during the so-called “bump ops” the FBI ran on Papadopoulos and Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, where the bureau used longtime CIA asset Stef Halper to try to catch them having possible compromising contacts with Russians.
Multiple attempts to reach Haspel by email and phone at her new job as chair of the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation in Herndon, Va., were unsuccessful.
A source familiar with Haspel’s thinking said she objected to releasing the report debunking the ICA because it might reveal sensitive intelligence, though its recent release proved no national security interests were harmed, including sources and methods.
John Durham
Nevertheless, as Trump’s first term drew to a close, there was one more opportunity to expose the Obama administration’s machinations. Ironically, that was forestalled by the special counsel who had been appointed to investigate the origins of the Russiagate hoax, John Durham. It was Trump’s attorney general, Barr, who tapped Durham, an old DOJ colleague and friend.
While Durham’s final report, which was not issued until 2023, raised serious questions about the Russiagate probe, his most significant decision may have occurred in the final days of the 2020 election when he quashed efforts to expose the plot to weaponize U.S. intelligence. That October, then-National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe sought to declassify and release a devastating 44-page report that refuted the Obama-ordered Intelligence Community Assessment’s explosive finding that Moscow tried to swing the election to Trump. When the ICA was finally declassified this summer, it set off a firestorm of controversy, leading to the investigation of Brennan and Clapper and the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.
In 2020, however, Durham insisted the ICA review be kept under wraps. Durham argued he was using the secret report, drafted by two career House Intelligence Committee investigators, in his inquiry into whether the FBI and CIA had politicized and weaponized intel against Trump.
“Durham specifically asked for that report to not be declassified and released, along with other things, because he wanted to use it as part of his investigation and prosecutions – or so we presumed,” the former senior ODNI intelligence official familiar with Ratcliffe’s declassification effort said.
Ratcliffe, now CIA director, initially agreed to withhold the report, which remained buried for the next five years – until Trump’s new National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard declassified and publicly released it virtually unredacted in July.
“After we gave Durham the report, along with over a thousand pages of other classified documents, he went ghost,” said the former senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We didn't hear from him, and he didn’t appear to do anything with the report.”
Although Gabbard’s release of documents makes clear that the ICA was a foundational document in the Russiagate hoax, Durham all but ignored it in his final report on the scandal. Outside of a footnote on page 7 citing the ICA – which states, “[S]ee also Intelligence Community Assessment, ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US. Elections’ (Jan. 6, 2017)” – there is no mention of the ICA elsewhere in his 316-page report. Nor does it appear in a recently declassified appendix to the report, even though Durham had interviewed the two Obama officials principally responsible for putting together the ICA – Brennan and Clapper.
“I have no clue why Durham left it out,” the former senior intelligence official said.
Attempts to reach Durham for comment were unsuccessful.
The declassified ICA is now being used as evidence in criminal probes of Obama-era figures, including Brennan, by the Justice Department. Prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida, who are reportedly trying to build a conspiracy of corruption case, recently issued a flurry of grand jury subpoenas targeting Brennan and Clapper, former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and other Obama-era officials who were involved in the crafting of the ICA. They seek communications records and other documents covering the 2016-2017 period when classified versions of the assessment were drafted and an unclassified version was released to the public.
Durham’s decisions are still influencing the debate over Russiagate. Washington media are skeptical prosecutors will find anything incriminating, because they maintain that Durham already plowed that ground.
“John Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration, looked exhaustively at the Russian interference assessment and found no criminal wrongdoing,” MSNBC national security correspondent Ken Dilanian recently opined. “But here the Justice Department is trying to take another crack at this?”
However, former Trump officials have come to doubt that Durham conducted anything approaching a thorough investigation of the matter. J.D. Gordon, a national security adviser to Trump, says the now-retired prosecutor merely “went through the motions.”
“Since John Durham didn’t include relevant and incriminating information available to him about the criminal conspiracy against a duly elected president, history should remember his efforts as a dismal failure,” Gordon told RCI.
“He treated nearly all conspirators with kid gloves,” Gordon added. “His gentle approach was the polar opposite of the [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller investigation, which relentlessly pursued Trump associates for anything under the sun, even though they were all innocent victims of the Russia ‘collusion’ hoax.”
Gordon notes that Mueller and his prosecuting staff, who found no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, dispatched FBI agents to grill Gordon three times between 2017 and 2019. They also got a grand jury to subpoena his phone records. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler demanded Gordon provide additional documents in 2019, and he complied. A retired Navy commander and former Pentagon spokesman under President George W. Bush, Gordon said he was forced to run up a five-figure legal bill defending himself against the fake scandal.
Rigged Intelligence
“The CIA engaged in a conspiracy to fabricate intelligence against Trump,” Harvey said. “They were effectively running an intelligence op targeting his campaign and presidency.”
The ICA was a key piece of the conspiracy, he noted, because it was strategically used as a pretext to pursue countless espionage investigations of Trump and his advisers that crippled his presidency.
A month after Trump defeated Clinton, President Obama ordered the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to go back and review their prior assessments that found no evidence the Russian government tried to hack the election for Trump.
Within just three weeks, the CIA came up with new evidence to conclude that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally launched an influence operation to help swing the race to Trump. The publicly released ICA report, which helped Obama and Clinton explain her shocking defeat, hid the fact that the CIA relied in part on the Clinton-funded dossier to reach its new conclusion.
Career intelligence analysts objected to using the dossier, but Obama’s top spook, Brennan, overruled them. At least one senior intelligence analyst, now a whistleblower cooperating with the DOJ in its ongoing investigation of the Russiagate hoax, said he was “threatened” by superiors to change his pre-election assessment to conform with the new ICA.
The whistleblower, who worked under then-DNI Clapper, also said he reached out to Special Counsel Durham's investigators to report suspicions of “manipulation” of raw intelligence that went into the ICA, but they never interviewed him, even though “I likely had information relevant to ongoing criminal investigations,” as RCI first reported.
“They tried to make it seem like Trump was Putin’s candidate, but there really was no evidence that Putin was trying to support Trump,” Harvey said. “If you read the [HPSCI] report [on the ICA] carefully, both Brennan and Clapper come across as the real malign operators, and it turns out that both of them knew Hillary had this whole Russia operation going against Trump from the start.”
Brennan and Clapper did not return requests for comment through their lawyers.
“They rigged and politicized the intelligence,” added Fleitz, “and that was obvious to anyone who read that dynamite report.” This included Barr, Durham, Bolton, Pompeo, Haspel, and other Trump appointees who, instead of exposing the scandal, suppressed it.
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