The major question for America today is why Joe Biden has not been indicted by the Attorney General and the FBI.
The Durham Report
The attached report is submitted to the Attorney General pursuant to 28 C.F.R. § 600.8(c), which states that, " [a]t the conclusion of the Special Counsel's work, he ... shall provide the Attorney General a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel." In addition to the confidential report required by section 600.8(c), the Attorney General has directed that the Special Counsel, "to the maximum extent possible and consistent with the law and the policies and practices of the Department of Justice, shall submit to the Attorney General a final report . .. in a form that will permit public dissemination." 1 This two-part report (Unclassified Report and Classified Appendix) is presented in fulfillment of these requirements and sets forth our principal findings and recommendations concerning the matters that were the subject of our review. The principal report is confidential, but contains no classified information based on thorough, coordinated reviews of the information contained therein by the appropriate authorities within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. The Classified Appendix likewise has been coordinated with those same agencies for classification purposes.
Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns Special Counsel
John H. Durham Submitted Pursuant to 28 C.F.R. § 600.B(c) Washington, D. C. May 12, 2023
https://www.justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf
Battenfeld: Durham report vindicates Trump’s belief he was targeted by FBI
Special counsel John Durham’s report on the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” Russia probe of Donald Trump vindicates the former president’s belief that he was targeted by enemies in the Justice Department and will only embolden Trump on the 2024 campaign trail.
“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and FBI failed to uphold their …
"The American Public Was Scammed": Trump Responds After Bombshell Durham Report 'Exonerates'
Former President Donald Trump on Monday has responded through a spokesman, saying that the report "proves" a coordinated effort by the federal government to interfere with the 2016 US election
"WOW! After extensive research, Special Counsel John Durham concludes the FBI never should have launched the Trump-Russia Probe! In other words, the American Public was scammed, just as it is being scammed right now by those who don’t want to see GREATNESS for AMERICA!" Trump wrote on Truth Social.
"The Durham Report spells out in great detail the Democrat Hoax that was perpetrated upon me and the American people. This is 2020 Presidential Election Fraud, just like ‘stuffing’ the ballot boxes, only more so."
"This totally illegal act had a huge impact on the Election. With an honest Media, we are looking at the Crime of the Century!"
Here's a summary of the main findings from Techno Fog via The Reactionary:
“The FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia.”
Crossfire Hurricane “was opened as a full investigation without [the FBI] ever having spoken to the persons who provided that information.” Days after it was opened, Peter Strzok was telling a London FBI employee that “there’s nothing to this.”
Internal FBI communications discussing the Crossfire Hurricane during its early stages: it’s “thin” and “it sucks”.
British Intelligence pushed back on Mueller requests for assistance: “[a British Intelligence person] basically said there was no [expletive] way in hell they were going to do it.”
Durham documents TWO investigations into Hillary Clinton - one involving the Clinton Foundation and one involving illegal foreign contributions to Clinton’s Campaign.
In one Clinton Campaign investigation, an FBI confidential human source (CHS) had offered an illegal foreign contribution to the campaign through an intermediary. The Clinton Campaign was “okay with it” and “were fully aware”. The CHS offered the FBI a copy of the credit card charge; the FBI never got receipts. In fact, the FBI handling agent told the CHS “to stay away from all events relating to Clinton’s campaign.”
As a result of ELECTION INTERFERENCE by @HillaryClinton and the @DNC in the 2016 election, President Trump faced 4+ years of relentless investigations and narratives BASED ON A LIE. The DOJ and FBI were actively working AGAINST him and the will of THE PEOPLE. Trump was right. pic.twitter.com/qHyFDVRFTQ
— Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) May 15, 2023
Props to Aaron, @ggreenwald, @mtaibbi and everyone else on the liberal-left who told the truth about RussiaGate from the beginning. They were slandered, blacklisted, betrayed by so-called friends, and they deserve credit. https://t.co/EoMKxJ55LJ
— Martyr Made 🦉🪓 (@martyrmade) May 15, 2023
Ready to give your Pulitzer back now? https://t.co/3UH1cPibWN
— Congressman Byron Donalds (@RepDonaldsPress) May 15, 2023
Special Counsel John Durham released his final report on Monday following over three years of investigation into the FBI's handling of the Trump-Russia probe.
According to Just the News, the report concludes that the FBI had no verified intelligence or evidence when it opened up an investigation into Donald Trump and his campaign in the summer of 2016.
Durham placed blame on the FBI and DOJ for failing to follow their own standards in a probe which should have never taken place - including the agency's surveillance of an American citizen without basis.
"Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we concluded the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report," wrote Durham.
The Durham report states that Clinton General Counsel Marc Elias "declined to be voluntarily interviewed by the Office." Elias was recently severed by the Democratic National Committee from representation. The campaign was fined by the FEC for his hiding the funding of the…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 15, 2023
"The FBI personnel also repeatedly disregarded important requirements when they continued to seek renewals of that FISA surveillance while acknowledging -- both then and in hindsight -- that they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the target was knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of foreign power."
🚨BREAKING: According to the Durham Report, the plan by Hillary Clinton to create a false story linking Donald Trump to Russia was briefed in August of 2016 by CIA Director John Brennan to President Obama, VP Biden, AG Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director Comey. pic.twitter.com/r2NvwJyKW8
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 15, 2023
More via Techno Fog,
The FBI and DOJ restricted two investigations into Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election:
1) The Clinton Foundation investigation
2) Illegal foreign contributions to the Clinton Campaign
"No investigative activities occurred for months"— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) May 15, 2023
According to an FBI CHS in early 2016, the Clinton Campaign was "fully aware" of and "ok with" a foreign contribution in violation of federal law.
The FBI agent didn't get receipts - and asked the source to stay away from the Clinton campaign.— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) May 15, 2023
The FBI made "no effort" to investigate "the Clinton campaign's acceptance of an illegal "campaign contribution that was made by the FBI's own long-term CHS."
— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) May 15, 2023
FBI leadership was so concerned about what its agents were finding about the Steele memos that they ordered:
"no more memos were to be written"
Do not "document any recommendations, context, or analysis"
(cover-up) pic.twitter.com/3EfxK3s2vh— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) May 15, 2023
The FBI paid Steele primary subsource Igor Danchenko a total of $220K.
The FBI - after it learned Danchenko lied to them, and during the Durham investigation - proposed future payments of $300K.
Payments that would have kept Danchenko under wraps. pic.twitter.com/lydAj8ziPq— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) May 15, 2023
Meanwhile, CNN's Jake Tapper said the report is "devastating to the FBI."
CNN'S Jake Tapper says the Durham report — which found the Russian collusion probe should've never been launched — is "devastating to the FBI" pic.twitter.com/HXxSOssuN4
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 15, 2023
Dershowitz: Durham Report Shows ‘Americans Are Right’ to Distrust Government
Special counsel John Durham’s report is a prime example of why Americans lack confidence in the government, according to prominent legal scholar Alan Dershowitz.
“I think it reveals that Americans are right to distrust the government—even civil servants people in the government,” Dershowitz told The Epoch Times on May 15. “This case demonstrates that people are prepared to distort the Constitution to get their way—get their partisan, political way.”
Durham, appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr in October 2020 to review the 2016–17 FBI investigation of alleged ties between former President Donald Trump and Russia, concluded in a report that authorities had no basis to launch the probe.
“[N]either U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Durham wrote in the report. Crossfire Hurricane is the FBI codename for the agency’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
Durham wrote that the FBI relied on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” for its investigation. “The objective facts show that the FBI’s handling of important aspects of the Crossfire Hurricane matter were seriously deficient,” he added.
Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said that the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI and the CIA, saw Trump as a “danger,” a view that the scholar said drove their conviction to “get Trump,” echoing the name and theme of his book, “Get Trump.” In that book, Dershowitz argues that Trump’s political enemies have waged an unconstitutional campaign to prevent Trump from retaking the presidency and, in the process, challenging the foundational American principles such as due process and free speech.
“I think it was who he was—what kind of an outsider he was. He was a disruptive outsider who had no respect for the Washington, government.”
‘Good People Can Do Bad Things’
Ultimately, Dershowitz believes good people were motivated by a biased mindset about Trump.
“I think the Durham report shows that good people can do bad things, when they decide they have to get Trump, that the Trump derangement syndrome really affects decent people,” he said.
He continued: “These are decent people who honestly believe that there was a higher duty than truth or principle in getting Trump and preventing him from winning as president. And that just distorts our Constitution, our rule of law, and our civil liberties.”
“So they use the apparatus of the Intelligence Community and the national security community, to distort reality and try to get him. And that’s what happens when good people do bad things,” Dershowitz said.
(Good people are no longer good when they do bad things! – WW)
The scholar also commented on the recent revelation that an open letter signed by dozens of former senior intelligence officials ahead of the 2020 presidential election turned out to be false. The letter framed the Hunter Biden laptop story published by the New York Post as Russian disinformation.
“These people should have known better. And they didn’t use their intelligence. They didn’t use their thoughtfulness, because they were so determined to get Trump, they were prepared to sign on to something which they never would have signed on to, had the shoe been on the other foot,” he said.
Dershowitz served on Trump’s defense team during the first impeachment against the former president.
‘Extraordinarily Dangerous’
The FBI investigation into the Trump campaign “is unprecedented in our history,” Dershowitz said, and he warned that the probe even happening “is extraordinarily dangerous.”
“I think there has to be consequences to the people who were involved. And that’s why I’m glad there are going to be hearings,” he said. “People have to know they can’t do this.”
On Monday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) announced that he had sent a letter to Durham, asking the special counsel to testify at a hearing on May 25. He asked Durham to be prepared to answer questions from committee members.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released a statement calling on the committee’s Chairman, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), to “quickly hold” a hearing on the Durham report.
Another senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), called on the FBI to start cooperating with a GOP subpoena for documents about then-Vice President Joe Biden.
“We know the FBI relied on unverified claims to relentlessly target a Republican president. What did the FBI do to investigate claims involving a Democrat President? It’s time for the FBI to cooperate and show its work to the American people,” Grassley said.
In response to the Durham report, the FBI acknowledged mistakes in its investigation of the Trump campaign.
“Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented,” the FBI said.
Trump said that “the American Public was scammed” in a statement on Truth Social following the release of the report.
“The Durham Report spells out in great detail the Democrat Hoax that was perpetrated upon me and the American people. This is 2020 Presidential Election Fraud, just like ‘stuffing’ the ballot boxes, only more so,” Trump added.
So damning': 'Fox & Friends' reacts to bombshell Durham report
Let’s Compare Media’s Lies About The Durham Report With What The Report Actually Said
BY: EDDIE SCARRY | MAY 16, 2023
It’s not as if John Durham is hiding the ball. He notes there were equal opportunities to investigate Clinton’s campaign in 2016, but those were handled more discreetly.
As with every major revelation proving them to be the treacherous, anti-democratic demons they are, the corporate media have instantly gone to work sweeping away the shocking conclusions of Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the FBI’s conduct as it related to its 2016 investigation of Donald Trump and Russia.
Years of work went into this thing, and the media believe all of its heinous discoveries can be set aside with a few news briefs belittling them as minor, unimpressive matters of mistake and “shortcomings.”
That’s not what Durham found. What he found was explicit bias within the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency against a democratically chosen presidential nominee.
The report, released Monday, is more than 300 pages, many of which recount information pieced together by Republicans in Congress and right-leaning journalists. But everything you need to know is in Durham’s summary, which, as tactfully as possible, describes the FBI’s 2016 investigation into Trump as not only without a foundation, but driven by political bias, dishonesty, and an appalling degree of personal animus.
The media won’t relay those facts from the report honestly because, of course, the media were complicit in the absolute con from the start. They hated Trump more than top officials at the FBI did and were more than happy to fan the flames that terrified the nation for years and irreparably crippled Trump’s entire term.
With that in mind, this is how big media described Durham’s findings versus what Durham actually said.
New York Times: “Mr. Durham’s 306-page report revealed little substantial new information about the inquiry, known as Crossfire Hurricane, and it failed to produce the kinds of blockbuster revelations accusing the bureau of politically motivated misconduct that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies suggested Mr. Durham would uncover.”
That suggests there was no proof or even significant evidence in Durham’s report that the FBI was hounding Trump for any reason outside of standard, dry agency business. That’s false.
What the report actually said: “Our investigation … revealed that senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially … from politically affiliated persons and entities. … In particular, there was significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents. The Department did not adequately examine or question these materials and the motivations of those providing them…”
In other words, the FBI willingly accepted allegations from Trump’s political rivals, treating them as objective data, rather than what they were: traditional campaign waste material.
Associated Press: “The report, the culmination of a four-year investigation into possible misconduct by U.S. government officials, contained withering criticism of the FBI but few significant revelations.”
That gives the impression that Durham’s report was a symbolic reprimand of no consequence. That’s false.
Here’s from the actual report: “FBI personnel … acknowledged — both then and in hindsight — that they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the Trump campaign was knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of a foreign power, or knowingly helping another person in such activities.”
In essence, FBI agents participating in the investigation were insincere in their efforts to find a sinister link between Trump’s campaign and Russia, because they knew it wasn’t likely to exist and didn’t believe there was a reason to try finding it anyway.
USA Today: “Special counsel John Durham criticizes FBI Trump-Russia probe, but recommends no wholesale changes.”
Mistakes were made but who among us?!
That’s not what Durham said. What he said is that the FBI abandoned its mission in pursuit of a political agenda and that if it had simply followed its own rules, one of the greatest political scandals in history would have never happened.
From Durham’s report: “There is a continuing need for the FBI and the Justice Department to recognize that lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents caused investigators to fail to adequately consider alternative hypotheses and to act without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power. Although recognizing that in hindsight much is clearer, much of this also seems to have been clear at the time.”
It’s not as if Durham is hiding the ball. He notes in his report that there were equal opportunities to investigate Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, but those were handled more discreetly, either by alerting the candidate’s team that it might have been targeted by potential foreign influence, or by simply dropping the matter altogether. (Hey, how about that?!)
Again, from the Durham report: “The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.”
In short, there was a double standard — a political one. A democracy can’t sustain this kind of scandal perpetuated by its chief law enforcers. But the media gave up on that a long time ago.
Durham’s Much-Needed Record Of Deep-State And Dem Corruption Proves Conservatives Were Spot-On
BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND |MAY 16, 2023
The special counsel’s report provides the summary Americans need to understand the breadth of the malfeasance.
Special Counsel John Durham released his long-awaited report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation Monday. While the 306-page report includes some new details of the Russia-collusion hoax, the Clinton campaign’s role in the plot, and the FBI and intelligence agencies’ misconduct, much of the content merely rehashes what conservative media have reported for the last five years. Still, our country needed a public record of the events that represent one of the biggest political scandals in American history, and on that front Durham delivered.
FBI’s Unjustified Investigation
Of the many details Durham confirmed in his report, officially titled “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns,” the most significant was that the FBI launched the Crossfire Hurricane investigation without justification. Both Durham and former Attorney General William Barr had previously conveyed that conclusion when they publicly challenged the inspector general’s position that the investigation into the Trump campaign had been properly predicated. But the 300-plus-page report elaborated on their reasoning.
As Durham explained in his executive summary, at the direction of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok opened Crossfire Hurricane as a “full investigation” almost immediately after receiving information on July 28, 2016, from Australia concerning a conversation between a diplomat and campaign volunteer adviser George Papadopoulos. The special counsel excoriated the FBI for opening the full investigation without even speaking with the Australian diplomat or conducting any review or analysis of the supposed intel. The FBI did not even collect or examine relevant intelligence from other U.S. agencies which, as Durham stressed, would have revealed no connection between Trump and Russian leadership officials.
In short, Durham stressed that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community” possessed any “actual evidence of collusion” when they launched Crossfire Hurricane, which spurred “multiple exhaustive and costly federal investigations.” The financial cost, however, pales in comparison to the harm inflicted on innocent individuals such as Carter Page and the damage done to the Trump administration — and our entire country.
Clinton’s Top Billing
Monday’s report also confirmed many details concerning Hillary Clinton and her campaign’s role in peddling the Russia-collusion hoax. However, Durham went much beyond summarizing the Clinton campaign’s hiring of Perkins Coie and in turn Fusion GPS, which contracted with Christopher Steele to compile the fraudulent dossier. Durham’s team also investigated the intelligence report that stated that on July 26, 2016, Hillary Clinton approved “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
Branding this the “Clinton Plan,” Durham’s report then detailed the intelligence agencies’ briefing of then-President Obama on the Clinton Plan and the CIA’s formal written referral memorandum to Comey, then the FBI director, and Strzok, then the FBI deputy assistant director. No investigation took place, though, and even now the full relevance of the Clinton Plan remains obscure, as the “additional facts that heightened the potential relevance of this” were included in a classified appendix.
For her part, Clinton claimed the “Clinton Plan” on which Obama was briefed was “Russian disinformation.” Clinton’s campaign cronies, such as John Podesta and Jake Sullivan, likewise told investigators the information was “ridiculous.” However, the special counsel’s report detailed extensive facts gathered by investigators supporting the idea of the “Clinton Plan.” Durham then concluded that either way, the government’s handling of the Clinton Plan represented a significant intelligence failure.
Beyond highlighting the Clinton campaign’s involvement in pushing the Russia-collusion hoax, Durham’s report focused heavily on Clinton to establish the double standard and political bias at work. The special counsel contrasted the DOJ’s handling of the Clinton Foundation investigation, as well as the FBI’s failure to probe foreign election influence operations targeting the Clinton campaign. While the FBI immediately opened a full investigation into Trump, the same did not occur when agents obtained stronger evidence of foreign interference related to Clinton.
The FBI’s failure to investigate the Clinton-connected Charles Dolan represented another clear example of disparate treatment of the Democrat candidate. An investigation into Dolan, who had more Russia connections than the four Trump-connected individuals investigated under the Crossfire Hurricane umbrella, was shut down by the FBI.
Outrageous FISA Abuse
Durham’s report also elaborated on the FISA abuse previously summarized by the inspector general. Durham focused heavily on the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier, stressing that agents relied on the unverified claims to support a FISA warrant and then sought three more extensions, even as the case against Page continued to weaken.
Relying on the Steele dossier also proved problematic, Durham noted, because Steele’s primary source was potentially a Russian asset. The report called out the FBI’s failure to consider that possibility, as well as its failure to conduct basic investigative techniques before relying on the dossier — again, facts long known by all except those who rely on the media outlets that pushed the hoax.
Complicit Media
This brings us to a final big-picture point: The media’s complicity in the Russia-collusion hoax was an undercurrent throughout the special counsel report.
While Durham’s investigation wasn’t about the press, over the course of the 300-some pages, the special counsel indicted our corporate media almost as much as the Clinton campaign and the FBI. From highlighting articles from legacy outlets such as The New York Times that botched major stories about Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia, to detailing the symbiotic relationship between the Clinton campaign and the media outlets, the Durham report made clear the press bore responsibility for the hoax as well.
None of this should be news, but it is because after peddling the Russia-collusion hoax, the corporate media refused to report on the unraveling of the scandal. The special counsel’s report provides the summary Americans need to understand the breadth of the malfeasance, and that is good even though Durham failed to hold anyone else criminally responsible for the plot.
In the days and weeks ahead, there will be plenty of time to evaluate the report as a whole and second-guess Durham’s charging decisions, but for now, we should celebrate that a public record of the extensive misconduct has finally been made.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist's senior legal correspondent
Durham Report Confirms TRUMP EXONERATED and FBI CORRUPTION Revealed in MASSIVE Report
In A Healthy ‘Democracy,’ John Brennan Would Already Be In Prison
The former CIA director should have been driven into exile years ago.
The just-released Durham report confirmed that the FBI not only failed to corroborate the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton’s oppo-doc against Donald Trump, but it regularly ignored existing, sometimes dispositive, evidence to keep the investigation alive. Some officials were credulous. Others were devious. But no one “stole” our democracy — other than perhaps intelligence officials and the journalists who helped feed the collective hysteria over Russia.
John Brennan, Hamas-loving authoritarian and partisan propagandist, almost surely knew it was a con from the start. Yet he spent four years on television sounding like a deranged subreddit commenter. Even after privately admitting he knew there was no collusion, Brennan kept lying and using his credentials to mislead the public.
From Durham’s report:
CIA Director John Brennan and Deputy Director David Cohen were interviewed by the Office and were asked about their knowledge of any actual evidence of members of the Trump campaign conspiring or colluding with Russian officials. When Brennan was provided with an overview of the origins of the Attorney General’s Review after Special Counsel Mueller finding a lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities, Brennan offered that “they found no conspiracy.”
As Durham points out, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report, and after Brennan admitted no one found a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, the former head of the CIA went on with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, another all-star election “denier,” and claimed that he “suspected there was more” to collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin than Mueller had let on.
Did I mention this was the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency?
Brennan must have been relying on that same gut instinct that led him to sign a letter asserting that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scoop, a journalistic effort with more corroboration than virtually anything connected to Trump’s alleged “collusion,” had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The House Judiciary Committee recently uncovered a Oct. 19, 2020, email from CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who was working with the Biden campaign to concoct “a talking point” to “push back on Trump” during the final presidential debates, asking Brennan to sign on to the “disinformation” letter. “Ok, Michael, add my name to the list. Good initiative. Thanks for asking me to sign on,” was Brennan’s reply.
That’s all it takes for the former CIA director, a man who was given immense unchecked power — a man who oversaw secret kill lists and was the driving force behind drone strikes on civilians (including an American citizen) — to sign a letter he knew would obstruct the workings of “democracy” and the free press.
This is a man who still has access to classified documents. You might remember all the hand-wringing over broken norms when Trump allegedly barred intelligence agencies from sharing classified information with Brennan. The New York Times even gave him a column to argue that Trump’s claims of “no collusion” were “why the president revoked my security clearance,” which, again, he almost certainly knew was a lie.
Of course, Brennan should have been denied access to any classified material and driven into exile after he was caught overseeing an operation of illegal spying on staffers in the Senate. CIA officials broke into Senate computer files and viewed emails and drafts of a report on torture. All of it was illegal. Brennan covered up the agency’s actions (also illegal), blamed the Senate, and pushed to fire at least one staffer who was tasked with investigating his agency.
All this happened when the tan-suited Obama was in charge, so most people probably missed it.
It wasn’t until the CIA’s inspector general confirmed this wrongdoing that Brennan began negotiating with the lily-livered senators about owning up to the spying. Even then, Brennan was lying. When asked about the CIA hacking into Senate computers at an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, Brennan responded by saying, “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Nothing? “I mean, we wouldn’t do that,” he went on. “I mean, that’s just beyond the — you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.” Brennan went on to say: “Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”
The Obama administration backed Brennan fully, and the Senate moved on. No one put him under oath and grilled him about the specifics. As with the FBI interference in the 2016 election, not one person was held accountable for domestic spying, much less fired.
Not that my voices matters very much, but this is probably the first time in 20 years of writing — and I’ve written thousands of columns and millions of published words — that I’ve wondered why a public official isn’t in prison. Brennan has abused his position, power, and access with impunity for years. He deserves a bright orange jumpsuit. Yet we also all know he’ll never be held accountable either. So, at the very least, let’s hope he can be disgraced.
https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/16/in-a-healthy-democracy-john-brennan-would-already-be-in-prison/
The Durham Report Leaves No Doubt: The FBI Is A Mortal Threat To Democracy
What the report reveals above all is that the deep state is real, it’s corrupt, and it’s at war with the American people.
Imagine someone told you that in the run-up to a U.S. presidential election, the FBI tried to undermine a candidate at the behest of the opposing campaign by cooking up a false narrative of collusion with Moscow.
And let’s say this conspiracy implicated not just the FBI but also the White House, Justice Department, and CIA — and that nearly the entire corporate press went along with it, gleefully spreading the false narrative that this candidate was a Russian agent, running story after story of fabricated nonsense in a coordinated effort to ensure the opposing candidate won.
In normal times, you’d scoff at such an outlandish story, dismiss it as the plot of some half-baked Tom Clancy novel. That could never happen in America, you’d say, where we have free and fair elections, the rule of law, and so on. And anyway, the media would never allow it to happen. They’d be too invested in exposing the conspiracy and claiming, rightly, a Watergate-type story of their very own.
But you’d be wrong. All of that really happened in 2016, recounted in all its jaw-dropping detail in Special Counsel John Durham’s306-page report, released Monday after nearly four years in the making. The big takeaway from the report is that the Obama-era FBI launched a full investigation of the Trump campaign, code named Crossfire Hurricane, in the summer of 2016 despite having zero evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia.
Not only that, but officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government, including President Obama, knew that the entire false narrative that Trump was colluding with Moscow was completely made up by the Clinton campaign in an effort to weaponize the federal government against Trump and distract from Hillary Clinton’s own email server scandal.
The Durham report recounts how in August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan briefed Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, and other senior administration officials on what the report calls the “Clinton Plan intelligence,” a scheme Clinton approved in July 2016 “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
In other words, all of these senior officials, some of the most powerful people in the federal government, knew as early as the summer of 2016 that the Clinton campaign had a plan to whip up a scandal by falsely alleging collusion between Trump and Moscow. But all of them ignored this important fact when the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane around the same time on the basis of far-fetched claims that Trump was a Russian agent — claims that were made in the Steele dossier, a slapdash piece of oppo-research the Clinton campaign itself had paid for.
The FBI knew all of this, as did Brennan, yet they ignored it to keep Crossfire Hurricane alive, along with the narrative that Trump was in bed with Russia. That fall, the FBI used the baseless dossier to acquire FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. All of this was eventually leaked to a compliant and incurious new media, and voila! Clinton’s Trump-Russia scandal was born — without a shred of evidence, and indeed despite significant evidence to the contrary.
My colleagues at The Federalist have detailed the shocking contents of the Durham report (here, here, here, and here), but taking a step back from the dizzying array of details, every American needs to understand that what made all of this possible was the stupefying level of corruption and partisan malevolence deep inside our federal government.
The Russia-collusion hoax was concocted and brought to life only because the most powerful people in the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community wanted an excuse to weaponize the federal government against Donald Trump. They didn’t want him to be president, simple as that. It didn’t matter to them what voters wanted; they thought they knew better. So they felt any abuse of power was justified in preventing Trump from winning the White House.
That they failed is cold comfort because we know that failure didn’t deter these people. When the next election cycle came around, the same people, including Brennan, were back at it, using their power and influence to shape public perceptions of the campaign and push outright falsehoods on the American people. It was Brennan, after all, who worked with CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell to produce a letter signed by dozens of former intelligence officials in October 2020 denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop story as having, in Brennan’s words, “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” — another outlandish claim for which there was zero evidence.
We know, too, that corporate media are undeterred by these embarrassing episodes. Some of the outlets that did the most to push the Russia-collusion hoax were rewarded for their efforts with Pulitzer prizes and other accolades. None of them have recanted their fake stories, and nearly all of them reacted Monday to the Durham report by dismissing it as a “big fat nothing” or, in the words of CNN’s Nicolle Wallace, a “rabbit hole conspiracy” — without a hint of self-awareness that her own network was a chief purveyor of the very real Trump-Russia conspiracy.
Beyond the shamelessness of the media and the corruption of government officials, the Durham report is a sobering reminder that we can’t sustain a self-governing republic under these conditions. When the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of the federal government can be used as a weapon to undermine an outsider candidate for high office, it means our republic is in grave danger.
It means, too, that it would be better if we had no FBI at all than the corrupt agency we have now, which sees fit to traffic in actual disinformation, spread conspiracy theories, and throttle the democratic process whenever a candidate comes along who threatens the status quo. That’s the real lesson of the Durham report, and we ignore it at our peril.
Ep. 2012 It Was A Coup Attempt
https://bongino.com/ep-2012-it-was-a-coup-attempt
Durham Report Shows Government’s ‘Misinformation’ Czars Are The First To Believe It
The FBI’s Russia hoax was straight disinformation.
Special Counsel John Durham has finally completed his long-awaited report on the 2016 election and related rot emanating from the FBI and intelligence agencies, and it contains some pretty damning conclusions. A few were already fairly obvious: The Steele dossier was a joke, Obama’s FBI was rabidly attempting to spy on the regime’s enemies, intelligence agencies apparently had zero evidence of collusion when they opened Crossfire Hurricane, and this action “had the potential of affecting the 2016 election.”
But woven throughout the report’s many revelations is a theme condemning the same feds who have appointed themselves the arbiters of all they consider “mis-, dis-, and malinformation.” In short, it’s the powerful members of the Department of Justice — not some random QAnon Facebookers or moms who show up to talk at school board meetings — that are the biggest believers and purveyors of misinformation. When the feds received false information that supported their biases about Donald Trump, Russia, and the 2016 election, they gobbled it up hook, line, and sinker, no matter how unreliable the source or suspect the information.
The dossier from former British spy Christopher Steele is a prime example. According to Durham’s report, the FBI “ultimately was not able to confirm or corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in [Steele’s] reports” but used them anyway as a pretext to spy on the Trump campaign.
Even Steele’s primary sub-source, Russian national Igor Danchenko, who bragged about being the source for 80 percent of Steele’s “intel,” couldn’t corroborate Steele’s claims. In fact, Danchenko’s story didn’t match what Steele had previously told the FBI, but agents never told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about these inconsistencies when applying for warrants to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. And when the feds learned that Danchenko had lived stateside for years, despite repeated claims he was Russia-based, they not only didn’t correct the error in their FISA applications, but they adopted Danchenko as a confidential human source, paying him for info that didn’t corroborate the Steele dossier in the least.
But the FBI had more important things to do than verify the veracity of information. After all, they had Trump associates to spy on. They needed a pretext, Steele and Danchenko provided it, and the FBI ran with it, answering the question of whether they give a hoot about sniffing out real disinformation.
Maybe, maybe it would be one thing for America’s top intel agents and investigators to get sidetracked by sophisticated info ops from foreign adversaries containing impenetrable layers of deception. But this isn’t the FBI getting tripped up by misinformation per se — it’s the feds sprinting with it. Here’s more from Durham’s report:
Notice the order of events here. The FBI dreams up a hypothesis that Trump or his allies colluded with the Russians. But instead of doing the “crucial” work of analyzing and assessing contradictions, ambiguities, and other inconsistencies in the disinformation they were receiving, the feds took it at “face value” and “immediately” launched a full-tilt investigation into members of an opposing party’s presidential campaign, which had the obvious potential to undermine the self-governing fabric of our republic by interfering in an election.
Steele’s dossier — the “sensational allegations” of which were never verified — ultimately crumbled, but as Durham wrote, “not before it had been continuously adopted by the FBI as supportive of its underlying theory regarding collusion.”
In other words, the overarching takeaway from the Durham report is that the FBI’s Russia hoax was straight disinformation. And the upper echelons of U.S. federal intelligence and investigation not only believed it. They spread it so far and wide that seven years later, many Democrats and the media still parrot it as the surest information there ever was. If misinformation is a bear trap, the feds are both the snagged bear and the scheming trapper.
It’s important not to give the FBI and intel agencies more credit than they deserve, for while you shouldn’t ascribe malice to that which can be explained by stupidity, you also mustn’t underestimate the strength and determination of the deep state. Therefore, none of this is to say the feds’ failure to detect misinformation was an innocent error; it’s obvious they needed some pretext to persecute their enemies, and they found one. When they heard info they liked, they saw red. At the same time, however, Durham’s language leaves no doubt that, to some degree, the feds actually believed disinformation.
In his report, the special counsel likens the hoax buy-in to the circumstances surrounding Robert Hanssen, “the most damaging spy in FBI history.” While working in counterterrorism for more than two decades, Hanssen gave tons of America’s secret information to the KGB, resulting in the Soviets even murdering many confidential sources. How on Earth could the FBI possibly not sniff out Hanssen as the mole for more than 20 years? Well, not because he was a remarkably cunning “master spy,” the Office of Inspector General concluded, but because of the FBI’s “longstanding systemic problems,” which caused them to hyperfocus on a different agent whom they wrongly believed to be the mole. The OIG wrote:
The FBI should have seriously questioned its conclusion that the CIA suspect was a KGB spy and considered opening different lines of investigation. The squad responsible for the case, however, was so committed to the belief that the CIA suspect was a mole that it lost a measure of objectivity. … [W]hile FBI management pressed for the investigation to be completed, it did not question the factual premises underlying it. (Emphasis mine)
The FBI’s being “so committed” to falsehoods led to dire consequences then and now. Yet there may be no more powerful entity committed to stomping out so-called “disinformation” than the deep state.
As The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland and others have detailed extensively, the federal government — from the FBI to the Department of State to the Department of Homeland Security and more — has played an integral role in the Censorship Complex. They throttle the speech of Americans for the crime of expressing wrongthink on anything from elections to viruses — or, as they call it, misinformation, disinformation, and malformation.
Most recently, news broke that the Central Intelligence Agency solicited signatures from former intel officials to decry Hunter Biden’s laptop — which the FBI already knew was legitimate because it had seized it almost a year prior and, according to whistleblowers, told agents “you will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop” — as “Russian disinformation” to help then-candidate Joe Biden silence questions about his family’s pay-to-play corruption.
This deep-state-manufactured “disinformation” letter was then also then used by Big Tech to nuke reporting of the scandal right before the pivotal 2020 election. Add to that the FBI prepping social media giants to censor the laptop October surprise by framing it as an incoming “propaganda” dump — another buzzword for disinformation.
Calling the FBI corrupt is akin to calling the pope Catholic. But don’t miss what the Durham report reveals about America’s self-appointed and heavily armed hall monitors of “misinformation”: They are the first suckers to believe it.
Durham Report Implicates FBI and Corporate Media for Russia Collusion Lies, with Fifth Column Hosts
White House refuses to comment on Durham report
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