Paul Sperry: Trump's Seditious Appointees Schemed to Advance the RussiaGate Hoax Alive

Including John Durham, Sperry writes.

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.

...

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.

...

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 in
...

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."

Read the whole thing.

Related: Obama's and Biden's henchmen in the FBI spied on GOP House leader Jim Jordan's phones and emails for... two years.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan on Thursday revealed that the Biden administration subpoenaed his phone records for a two-year period as part of the Arctic Frost investigation, making his records more expansive than other lawmakers.

The announcement comes after recent revelations claimed the Biden FBI snooped on the phone records of Republican members of Congress, including eight senators, during its January 6 investigation.

Jordan said his phone records were requested by Justice Department prosecutor Timothy Duree, who worked with Thomas Windom, one of Jack Smith's top prosecutors, in April 2022. The request sought his phone records from Jan. 1, 2020, through April 2022.

The toll records did not include the contents of Jordan's phone calls or messages but did include details about inbound and outbound calls, text messages, direct-connect communications and voicemail messages.

The subpoena was also accompanied by a nondisclosure order that claimed notifying Jordan of the subpoena could "result in flight from prosecution, destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, and serious jeopardy to the investigation."

Somewhat related, sort of?

Video shows the suspected J5 "bomber" visiting a third building -- the Congressional Black Caucus Institute building.

Where the suspect... kneeled.

The footage contains a previously nonpublic segment showing the alleged pipe bomber approaching the Congressional Black Caucus Institute building near Capitol Hill and kneeling down near a bush on the property, Loudermilk told Just the News.

Just the News reviewed the footage and confirmed the lawmaker's description.

"We've tracked that path with security camera footage that we have access to, but they missed one key aspect...they made a stop as they walked past the Congressional Black Caucus, turned, and went on to the property and knelt down by a bush. Now this is the first real stop that the pipe bomber made," Loudermilk told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Thursday.

"Now this is before they actually placed the bomb at the DNC. So, what were they doing there at the Congressional Black Caucus? No bomb was found there," Loudermilk said.

The clue is in the bamboo.

posted by Ace at 03:20 PM

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