“All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals — all to get Trump. Thank you to the career @CIA officers who conducted this review and exposed the facts.”
That was Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe in a July 2 post on X describing a June 26 review of the intelligence that was used against President Donald Trump before his first election in 2016 to justify an ongoing FBI and Justice Department counterintelligence operation against his campaign and ultimately his presidency, falsely accusing him of conspiring with Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta emails and post them on Wikileaks in 2016.
The review, “Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference” by the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis, found of the Russiagate investigation, which included the Jan. 6, 2017 “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” had “a higher confidence level than was justified; insufficient exploration of alternative scenarios; lack of transparency on source uncertainty; uneven argumentation; and the inclusion of unsubstantiated Steele Dossier material.”
The tradecraft review however only comes in at eight pages, which likely isn’t cutting it, if Congress, the Justice Department and the American people are to get to the bottom of how U.S. intelligence services and law enforcement interfered in the 2016 election at a level never seen before, featuring the incumbent party, the Democrats, conducting surveillance on the opposition party, Trump and the Republicans, in an election year.
Clearly, the American people need President Trump to release the remaining Crossfire Hurricane documents the Justice Department sat upon during the Biden administration despite the President declassifying them on Jan. 19, 2021.
In that declassification memo, the President had stated “At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.
“I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible. In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its continuing objection to any further declassification of the materials in the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure. I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission.
“I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.”
But the binder of remaining documents was never made public by the Justice Department. It still hasn’t since Trump came back into office but is thought to be imminently released following the President’s campaign pledge to release everything.
Compared the eight pages of a narrow tradecraft review by the CIA, a commission that looked at 2002-2003 WMD intelligence failures warranted 619 pages, and that was the declassified version.
There were a lot of moving parts in Trump-Russia hoax: the DNC-Podesta hack, Wikileaks, Guccifer 2.0, Crowdstrike, the former British spy Christopher Steele dossier and so forth, but the common throughline was President Trump’s political foreign policy positions that were repeatedly cited as corroborating evidence in the 2016 FISA warrant application against Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.
The principal allegation of the FISA warrant against “The target of this application is Carter W. Page, a U.S. person, and an agent of a foreign power… The status of the target was determined in or about October 2016 from information provided by the U.S. State Department…”
To make the accusation, as the FBI and the Justice Department had to give the FISA Court a “statement of the facts and circumstances relied upon by the applicant to justify his belief that… the target of the electronic surveillance is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power…” under 50 U.S. Code § 1805(a)(2)(A). Those allegations relied on the Clinton campaign and DNC-financed Christopher Steele dossier that there was a “well-developed conspiracy” by Russia and the Trump campaign to hack the DNC and give their emails to Wikileaks.
But they also stated as part of the justification for that election interference and surveillance of the Trump campaign that Russia was attempting to convince the Trump campaign to not send weapons to Ukraine and to instead recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine, telling the FISA Court that the Trump campaign, per the FISA application, “worked behind the scenes to make sure [the Republican] platform would not call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces” stating Trump “might recognize Crimea as Russian territory and lift punitive U.S. sanctions against Russia,” citing news reports.
The Justice Department also included an Aug. 2016 Politico story highlighting Trump’s opposition to U.S. intervention in Ukraine citing Trump’s suggestion the people of Crimea preferred to live in Russia, and his doubts that the territories Russia had seized could be reclaimed suggested without risking World War III.
At a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the Politico report relied upon by the Justice Department quoted Trump saying a military conflict to take back Crimea would risk nuclear war: “You wanna go back? …You want to have World War III to get it back?”
And it quoted Trump on ABC’s “This Week” in July 2016 suggesting the people of Crimea supported Russian annexation: “The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.”
The baseline allegation against Trump and his campaign leading to the targeting via FISA in 2016 was simply for having different foreign policy views! And then supposedly having contacts with a foreign adversary that were concocted by Trump’s political opponent via the dossier all to bolster the imminent Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) finding and to color Trump’s views as foreign-controlled, all used to justify the Justice Department investigation that hampered the first three years of the Trump administration.
Overall, it appears the ICA was designed to push Trump into aggressive positions vis a vis Ukraine, to send weapons and to escalate and to remove any possibility of deescalatory talks.
When then-incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn patriotically tried to deescalate relations with Russia in Dec. 2016, speaking with Russian ambassador Sergei Kisylak on the phone, he was immediately outed by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius in an attempted decapitation of the Trump presidency on day one.
As soon as the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was finally released in 2019, exonerating President Trump of any conspiracy with Russia to hack the DNC and Podesta emails and he contemplated removing weapons in Ukraine with his conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Democratic Party-led House immediately moved for impeachment.
The evidence is overwhelming: Russiagate was designed to escalate and ensure continued U.S. involvement in Ukraine that had begun during the Obama administration. The FISA warrant cited Trump’s positions on Ukraine.
When General Flynn attempted to deescalate with Russia in part over Ukraine but also Syria, he was removed.
When the President was finally free of the investigation and the President pursued his peace agenda by going directly to Zelensky, it was immediately weaponized by Congress to further prevent the President from changing trajectory we were on and to run the rest of the clock out on the Trump presidency.
Investigators must never forget the 2016 FISA warrant pointed directly at the State Department: “The status of the target was determined in or about October 2016 from information provided by the U.S. State Department…” What was going on at the State Department in Oct. 2016? That is something Secretary of State Marco Rubio must find out.
We have yet to be given the true origin story of Russiagate, of how the constitutional Article II presidency where the President is the only constitutional voice of U.S. foreign policy was nearly destroyed, presumably to push us into war or the edge of one. And we’re still not out of the woods yet as the President’s peace talks continue stalling. Sadly, Russia’s war in Ukraine could still escalate into a much wider war, threatening not just Ukraine, but the entire world.
If only we had listened to Trump and it might have been averted. Who knows? The intelligence community, DOJ, the Obama White House, the Clinton campaign, the DNC and Congress all had roles in this that almost certainly have already been documented but may yet be classified.
The 2005 WMD commission “found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction…” Whereas we already know the 2016-2017 ICA was distorted and manipulated, because the CIA Director just told us.
But what the government hasn’t told the American people is why this all happened. In part, it was to supplant the Article II presidency so that the deep state would decide where and when we go to war, and which countries the U.S. was allowed to communicate with.
Declassify everything, Mr. President.
Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
