Jonathan Turley: Florida Grand Jury May Finally Reveal the Truth of the RussiaGate Criminal Conspiracy -- and Maybe the Consequences, Too

The Pine-Scented Druid Philosopher James Comey has been subpoenaed.

I don't know if any of this will result in anything, but my stars, I need some hope.

This week, we learned that the probe into the Russian conspiracy theory in Florida is moving forward with the disclosure that former FBI Director James Comey has been subpoenaed. What is different in this probe is that it is pursuing the real Russia conspiracy -- the creation of a false narrative to kneecap the first Trump administration.

At issue is what could be the greatest political hit job in history. Of course, the growing evidence of this conspiracy continues to be buried by one of its key components: the media. Nevertheless, the "truth will out," and it appears to be coming out in Florida.

Headed by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, the investigation is building on information uncovered by House and Senate committees that was long buried by the Biden administration. That evidence appears to show a knowing effort to manufacture a Russian conspiracy hoax at the urging of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Ironically, the Washington Post and the New York Times received Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting promoting this Russian conspiracy hoax. The media spent years in wall-to-wall coverage of disproven allegations, including many claims made in the debunked Steele Dossier that had been secretly funded by the Clinton campaign.

The true Pulitzer Prize-worthy story was staring the media in the face the whole time: a conspiracy to create a false conspiracy narrative to elect Clinton and later to derail the Trump administration. The latter effort succeeded with help from top intelligence figures.

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Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Peter Strzok, a key figure in the investigation, texted FBI lawyer Lisa Page to assure her "that there's no way [Trump] gets elected," adding that they "can't take that risk." He added that they had it all in hand because "It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."

In fact, whether it was known to Strzok or not, there was an insurance policy in the works. In July 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama on Hillary Clinton's alleged "plan" to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as "a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server."

Brennan is believed to be a target of the current investigation, including possible perjury before Congress.

In reality, within days of that briefing on how Clinton would create this conspiracy theory, the investigation began, just as the Clinton campaign hoped it would.

Early on, the FBI was told by the CIA that its sources -- and the Steele dossier -- were unreliable. However, key FBI officials continued the surveillance and the investigation targeting the Trump campaign and key figures. One official later pleaded guilty to lying to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to continue surveillance without an evidentiary basis.

At the end of 2016, a CIA assessment found that "Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent U.S. election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure." That presidential daily brief was scheduled to be published on Dec. 9, 2016, but the office of James Clapper, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, reportedly stopped the publication "based on some new guidance."

Clapper later joined Obama, along with John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and others, in a meeting that would ultimately inject the debunked theory directly into the media.

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Back in 2016, the rewritten assessment was quickly leaked to an eagerly awaiting media. It was the perfect hit job carried out by top Obama administration officials at the very end of their time in power .

In testimony on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed that the Steele dossier "wasn't part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done."

Yet the declassified material appears to contradict that sworn statement. Brennan allegedly not only discussed the dossier but also insisted upon its inclusion in the new assessment Obama had requested.

Brennan and his handpicked team went to extraordinary lengths to revive the conspiracy theory that they knew was the original objective of the Clinton campaign.

Analysts complained that the reliance on the Steele Dossier "ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment." One CIA analyst told investigators that Brennan "refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier's main flaws, [Brennan] responded, 'Yes, but doesn't it ring true?'"

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None of this will get anyone a Pulitzer, because the politics is wrong. However, it might just force the truth into the open. With Democrats promising to resume impeachments and investigations if they retake power in the midterms, it would be useful for the public to have a full understanding of what actually occurred last time.

It is time for the public to learn whether top Obama officials and the media pulled off the greatest political hoax in history

John Brennan may be indicted for perjury. He repeatedly testified under oath that the now-heavily-discredited Steele Dossier formed no part of his fake report implicating Trump in RUSSIAN collusion, but in contemporaneous documents, he says he fought for the inclusion of the fake dossier in the report:

Meanwhile: Paul Sperry says justice is coming for Ciaramella and his handler, the IG who fast-tracked his hearsay claims into an IG investigation, ignoring department rules to do so.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:10 PM

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