Hillary Clinton and her campaign legmen conceived and approved the plan to accuse President Trump of collusion with Russia to win the 2016 election. The plan was meant to distract the public from the former secretary of state’s illegal use of a private server to send and receive classified e-mails, a revelation that was harming her campaign.
That claim comes in a letter from John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C). Last week, he revealed that the FBI knew the infamous Steele Dossier, which accused Trump of the Russian collusion, was based on intelligence from a Russian spy.
Released hours before yesterday’s presidential debate, Ratcliffe’s letter says U.S. intelligence agencies learned about the Clinton smear job from a Russian intelligence source.
Graham will likely ask former FBI Director James Comey about the revelation when Comey testifies before the Judiciary Committee today.
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The Letter
“In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee,” Ratcliffe wrote.
Ratcliffe’s subordinates in intelligence agencies do not know whether the allegation is accurate, or “the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”
But Ratcliffe did divulge the jist of notes from former CIA Director and one-time communist John Brennan:
According to his handwritten notes, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
Though the information was unverified, U.S. officials took it seriously enough to let former FBI Director James Comey know about it, the letter says. On September 7, 2016, intelligence officials “forwarded an investigative referral” to Comey and his deputy Peter Strzok about “U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.”
Why It’s Important
Ratcliffe’s letter is significant given what occurred just after the public learned that Clinton illegally used a private e-mail server.
As Andrew McCarthy wrote at National Review, though Clinton clearly broke the law, Comey cleared her of criminal charges on July 5, 2016 because she did not intend to commit a crime.
But weeks later, on July 22, hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee surfaced, and during that time, the Clinton campaign, through a cutout, hired British spy Christopher Steele to compile his now-famous dossier that detailed Trump’s supposed “collusion” with Russia.
On Friday, Graham’s committee revealed that the FBI knew that Steele’s source was a Russian and possibly a spy — Igor Danchenko, McCarthy reported on Saturday — whom the FBI had investigated in 2009 and 2010.
Days after the hacked DNC emails began being published, Steele generated a dossier report alleging that Trump was in “a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with “Russian leadership.” The “evidence of extensive conspiracy between Trump’s campaign team and [the] Kremlin,” Steele claimed, included the hacking and publication of DNC emails: “[T]the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the [DNC] to the WikiLeaks platform.” This “operation,” Steele maintained, “had the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.” In exchange, Trump had purportedly committed both to downplay Russian intervention in Ukraine and raise American defense commitments to NATO as campaign issues.
Further, Steele ludicrously claimed that Trump had “moles within the DNC and hackers in the US as well as outside in Russia.” On the Trump side, Steele added, the conspiracy was “managed” by Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, who was purportedly using campaign adviser Carter Page as an intermediary.
This story was absurd, through and through.
Yet the FBI then began its Crossfire Hurricane probe and used Steele’s fairy tale to justify seeking and procuring surveillance warrants on Trump campaign operative Carter Page.
Thus did the Russian collusion hoax get legs and start running.
Observed McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, Attorney General Bill Barr has “signaled U.S. intelligence community concern that the Steele dossier was used by Russia to feed disinformation to the U.S. government.”
As The New American reported last week, FBI agents purchased liability insurance in case they landed in hot water for pushing the Russia collusion hoax.
