Secret Meeting Opens Document Floodgates On Trump/Russia Hoax: Sperry

Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations,

The floodgates holding back long-buried classified documents exposing government efforts to claim Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election might finally be opening. 

Trump administration officials held an urgent meeting Sunday to discuss “new information on Russiagate,” which they might use to build a criminal conspiracy case against Obama and Biden administration political appointees who allegedly weaponized the government against Trump, two Trump administration officials told RealClearInvestigations.

The documents are said to contain long-classified information, including a secret 200-page congressional audit that reveals details about how an intelligence community assessment on Russia ordered by President Obama after the 2016 election was framed in a way that portrayed Trump as being beholden to the  Kremlin.

Sources told RCI that emails and other records tying the CIA’s controversial drafting of the Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] to the FBI’s discredited “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation targeting Trump could be released as part of an Office of the Director of National Intelligence report as early as Thursday. The White House was briefed on the development Tuesday, the sources said.

Participants in the Sunday meeting involving intelligence officials and their Department of Justice counterparts also discussed declassifying investigative notes and depositions taken by Special Counsel John Durham during his probe of the CIA’s and FBI’s handling of the ICA, which relied in part on an anti-Trump dossier financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Strengthening Case for Conspiracy 

The information could strengthen a criminal case against Obama’s top intelligence officers, including former CIA Director John Brennan, who allegedly gave false testimony to Congress about their role in using the dossier in the ICA, according to the officials who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information. Although the five-year statute of limitations on perjury means much of the testimony given about the ICA cannot be prosecuted, officials could still be charged with a conspiracy to commit perjury.

Sources said the meeting, which was arranged by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was held in a secure room known as a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility). The meeting also focused on the release of a highly restricted appendix to Durham’s final report that details intelligence Brennan intercepted exposing a plan by the Clinton campaign in July 2016 to stir up an election scandal involving Trump and Russia to distract from her email investigation. Instead of investigating the Clinton plot, the FBI opened an investigation into Trump and his campaign advisers for allegedly colluding with Russia.

Officials attending the meeting also discussed the need to declassify another classified annex, which was attached to an inspector general’s review of the FBI’s probe of Clinton’s unsecured email server. Sources say it details how then-Secretary of State Clinton’s improper email activity gave “foreign actors” access to classified material. Yet the FBI neglected to investigate the security breach, fitting a pattern of then-FBI Director James Comey letting Clinton off the hook while gunning for Trump.

Sources say the meeting was attended by senior staff of both ODNI and DOJ and also involved the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, but did not include Trump’s intelligence czar, DNI Tulsi Gabbard, or Attorney General Pam Bondi.

ODNI, which declined comment, has the authority to declassify documents across the intelligence community. Gabbard has tasked a group of analysts to comb through the explosive House Intelligence Committee’s 2019 review of the ICA and other still-secret documents to identify sensitive “sources and methods” and make redactions where necessary before declassifying them for possible use in court.

“They have a team working on that,” said an administration official familiar with the operation.

Weaponizing Russian Intelligence

A U.S. intelligence official alleged the outgoing administration weaponized the Russian intelligence to sabotage President-elect Trump in the weeks before he took office in January 2017.

“Obama ordered the ICA to set Trump up and knock him off balance before he could even get started,” said the senior official, who asked to remain anonymous. “This was an influence operation far more consequential than anything [Russian President Vladimir] Putin cooked up. Obama and Hillary [Clinton] schemed the op, and the CIA and FBI ran it.”

At the time they drafted the ICA in December 2016, this official noted, the CIA and FBI knew that Clinton had approved a plan by her then-foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan – who would later become President Biden’s National Security Advisor – to “stir up” a scandal on Trump about Russia. They also knew then that the dossier they referenced in the intelligence assessment was opposition research underwritten by the Clinton campaign.

Several months earlier, Brennan made a referral to the FBI to open a counterespionage case to find out how Russian intelligence intercepted information about Clinton’s plan to tie up Trump in a fake Kremlin scandal. 

Brennan appears to have been less concerned about the Clinton campaign’s disinformation campaign than the fact that Moscow knew about it. This so alarmed Brennan that he briefed Obama about it, according to a summary of his handwritten notes, declassified in 2020.

The referral, known as a counterintelligence operational lead (CIOL), was sent to Comey, who in turn forwarded it to then-FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok to investigate.

Strzok – who was fired by the FBI after his anti-Trump views became public – opened an investigation, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, not of Clinton but the Trump campaign. Brian Greer, a former Brennan aide, confirmed that the purpose of the counterintelligence operation was not to investigate the Clinton campaign’s dirty tricks, but to determine if the Russians had learned of the deceit by penetrating the Clinton camp. The concern, he said, was that Clinton “may have been spied on by a hostile intelligence service.”

Investigating Trump, Protecting Clinton

 So instead of investigating the Clinton campaign for providing knowingly false and/or misleading information to the FBI in the form of the transparently spurious Steele dossier, the bureau used the Clinton-funded dossier as evidence to obtain a wiretap to spy on the Trump campaign as part of a year-long counterintelligence investigation. The disparate treatment by investigators is something Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are focusing on in their conspiracy probe, sources say.

To that end, they are also seeking the declassification of all investigative records generated from the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe as well as its investigation of Clinton’s emails, codenamed “Midyear Exam.”

A Feb. 24, 2016, email between Strzok and then-deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s special assistant Lisa Page suggests the FBI investigators planned to treat Clinton with kid gloves during her interview.

Page: “One more thing: [Clinton] may be our next president. The last thing you need [is] going in there loaded for bear.”

Strzok: “Agreed.”

Durham noted that the still-classified appendix to his final report contains “specific indications and additional facts that heightened the potential relevance of this [Clinton Plan] intelligence” to further investigations.

Some former FBI officials say federal prosecutors have sufficient grounds to charge Obama’s FBI and CIA officials with criminal conspiracy. 

“You look back at what was going on in the FBI starting in 2016 [with] these cases [and] the way they approached Gen. [Michael] Flynn; Crossfire Hurricane; the Russian ‘collusion’ case [prosecuted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller]; then moving to the raid on Mar-a-Lago [and] the [DOJ] lawfare that came after President Trump, this is outrageous. And then you had the arrogance of these two individuals  – Comey and Brennan – it was unbelievable,” former FBI special-agent-in-charge Jody P. Weis, a 22-year veteran of the bureau, said in a recent interview. “So I’m extremely happy that someone is looking into this.”

Paul Sperry is an investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations. He is also a longtime media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Sperry was previously the Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, and his work has appeared in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Houston Chronicle, among other major publications.