CIA director: New secret documents will expose FBI's role in Trump-Russia hoax

7 hours ago 6
ARTICLE AD BOX

The FBI served as “an accelerant” to the Steele dossier’s bogus claims of a Trump-Russia collusion scheme ahead of the 2016 election, according to classified documents set for release in the coming days.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said he will declassify documents from the 2023 report from Justice Department special counsel John Durham, who investigated the origins of the FBI’s flawed Trump-Russia collusion probe.

Much of the FBI probe was based on a dossier compiled by British former spy Christopher Steele and paid for by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The dossier made wild and unproven claims about Mr. Trump.

“What hasn’t come out yet, and what’s going to come out, is the underlying intelligence in the John Durham report classified annex,” Mr. Ratcliffe told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “What that intelligence shows is that part of this was a Hillary Clinton plan, but part of it was an FBI plan to be an accelerant to that fake Steele dossier, to those fake Russian collusion claims, by pouring oil on the fire, by amplifying the lie and burying the truth of what Hillary Clinton was up to.”

Republicans are demanding that Mr. Trump’s Justice Department hold those accountable who were involved in pushing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, which hobbled the president’s first term.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard earlier this month declassified dozens of pages of documents related to the Trump-Russia probe into Mr. Trump.

The newly declassified materials showed President Obama ordering the CIA to revise their post-election assessment that Russia had not substantially interfered in the 2016 presidential contest.

Other documents showed Mr. Brennan ignored senior CIA officers who warned him against including the unverified Steele dossier in the revised assessment, issued in December 2016. That assessment claimed Russia was working on behalf of Mr. Trump to help him win the 2016 election.  

Mr. Ratcliffe said on Sunday that key players in the FBI and CIA, among them former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, were involved in a conspiracy against Mr. Trump, which he said is ongoing and can be prosecuted within the statute of limitations.

Mr. Ratcliffe said Mr. Comey’s congressional testimony about the matter, which took place in September 2020, “is completely inconsistent with what our underlying intelligence that is about to be declassified reflects.”

Mr. Durham concluded in his report that the FBI rushed into the probe of Mr. Trump without any solid evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. The FBI, the report found, wrongly used the unverified Steele dossier to seek permission to wiretap former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.  As part of the investigation, an FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to using false information to obtain the warrant to spy on Mr. Page.

Read Entire Article