Russiagate: The Comey Conspiracy

The walls of government secrecy around the “Russiagate” scandal are tumbling down. In September, former FBI Director James Comey was indicted on charges of false statements and obstruction of Congress; a federal judge threw out the case this week but Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed “an immediate appeal.” The indictment followed an outpouring of newly declassified documents and reports—from the FBI, CIA, Director of National Intelligence, and Senate Judiciary Committee—adding  weight to charges that starting in 2016, top government figures, including then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Hillary Clinton and others conspired to protect the Clinton presidential candidacy, defame candidate Donald Trump, and later destroy his presidency.

Comey is the first high-ranking official indicted in the Russiagate affair. The indictment, while narrow—limited to Congressional testimony—was nonetheless a major development. It raised the legal and historical stakes in the long-running scandal, with the prospect of further revelations and more indictments. The ultimate question: was there a conspiracy at the highest levels of government to unseat the forty-fifth president of the United States?

Comey was present at the creation of Russiagate, presiding in 2016 over two separate investigative tracks. One track involved Clinton: allegations that the Clinton Foundation was engaged in illegal “pay to play” fundraising and, separately, Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified emails while secretary of state.

The second track involved Trump: it began with an FBI investigation of candidate Trump driven by the Steele Dossier, a sensational compendium of outlandish anti-Trump smears collected by former British spy Christopher Steele.

Behind closed doors, in the deepest reaches of the Deep State, the two tracks converged. The Steele Dossier turned out to have been compiled for paymasters connected to the Clinton presidential campaign, though this fact would not emerge in public for years. And thanks in part to the recent release of previously hidden documents, we now know that at the Justice Department, at the height of the hard-fought 2016 campaign, while it was full speed ahead on the Trump investigations, FBI foot-dragging killed the Clinton probes.

The Clinton Connections

As the presidential campaign heated up, Hillary Clinton faced legal and political peril in the classified emails scandal and alleged Clinton Foundation wrongdoing. Judicial Watch played a leading role in driving both stories. In the emails case, Judicial Watch Freedom of Information lawsuits pressed the State Department for then-Secretary of State Clinton’s emails, leading to the revelation that Mrs. Clinton had set up a separate email server to conduct at-times classified government business. In the Clinton Foundation case, Judicial Watch FOIAs and reporting broke the news that the Clintons raked in over $48 million in Bill Clinton speaking fees—many of them from foreign entities—while his wife presided over U.S. foreign policy and readied her own presidential bid.

By 2016, Comey was anticipating a Clinton Presidency. He later told ABC News that at the time, he was “operating in a world where Hillary Clinton was going to beat Donald Trump.” In July, he threw Clinton a lifeline, announcing that the email probe was closed and that no charges would be filed. In 2018, a Justice Department inspector general report found that Comey’s July statement exonerating Clinton was “extraordinary and insubordinate” and that he had “usurped the authority of the Attorney General.”

But that wasn’t the only Clinton matter before Comey’s FBI. Agents in Washington, New York, and Little Rock were investigating pay-to-play corruption allegations against the Clinton Foundation.

New document disclosures by FBI Director Kash Patel in July shed more light on the case. Among the documents: a detailed timeline of FBI and Justice Department actions in the Foundation case. It reveals a bureaucracy of higher-ups moving to kill the case.

Written by a senior Justice Department lawyer detailed to the FBI, the timeline shows the close involvement of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Judicial Watch has extensively covered McCabe’s pro-Clinton activities, including his involvement in the classified emails case and his wife’s campaign for political office in Virginia as a Democrat.

John Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy of Just the News provide a definitive account of the timeline and the double standard at work in the FBI investigations of Clinton and Trump. They report that the Justice Department and McCabe “placed significant impediments in front of agents who believed they had evidence to justify a public integrity criminal case” against the Clinton Foundation.

One by one, in 2016, the three FBI field office investigations of the Clinton Foundation were strangled in the cradle. In Washington, according to the timeline, McCabe directed that “no overt investigative steps were to be taken” without his approval. In New York, investigators were told by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to “shut it down.” In Arkansas, field office requests for assistance were stalled or ignored. By August, the investigation was effectively dead, though bureaucratic wrangling persisted for another year.

Targeting Trump

On the opposite side of the political aisle, a much different FBI effort was underway.

In 2019, Special Counsel John Durham released a scathing final report on Russiagate, detailing a litany of improper and at times illegal acts by the FBI and Clinton campaign operatives related to the Steele Dossier and FBI investigations of Clinton and Trump. One of the earliest moves against Trump was the 2016 targeting of Carter Page, a U.S. citizen—entirely innocent of wrongdoing, it turned out—for surveillance based on spurious FBI applications to the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, including information from the Steele Dossier.

A Judicial Watch lawsuit forced more Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act disclosures, with the heavily redacted material suggesting the FBI and Department of Justice misled the FISA court by withholding information that the Clinton campaign was behind the “intelligence” used to persuade the judges to issue the warrants.

In June, Judicial Watch sued the Justice Department for all records related to Biden-era FISA warrants and other court actions targeting Trump. “I have zero doubt—and every reason to believe—the Biden gang was spying on Trump and his team,” said JW President Tom Fitton.

Patel’s July disclosure of new documents in the Russiagate affair was not limited to the Clinton Foundation timeline. It included another bombshell: a classified annex to the Durham Report. Patel sent it to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which released a redacted version.

In his public report, Durham detailed how the Steele Dossier played “an important role” in the FBI’s opening a FISA wiretap on Page. But the FBI could not “corroborate a single substantive allegation” in the Steele Dossier, Durham noted.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley noted that the new Durhan Annex material went further than the public report on several critical issues, including false statements to the FISA court and maneuvers by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants on Page.

In one instance, the classified annex notes that statements to FBI investigators about Page by a confidential informant were sharply contradicted by other evidence. But the Justice Department division responsible for preparing FISA warrants was “not apprised of the doubts” raised by the evidence and the FISA court itself was not made aware of conflicting evidence.

Taken by itself, the failings of the Page surveillance applications to the FISA court might be waved off as bureaucratic blunders in the heat of a high-stakes investigation. But they did not exist in a vacuum. The Page FISA applications are part of a mosaic of evidence suggesting a broad effort at the highest reaches of government and the Democratic Party to thwart Trump.

“Based on the Durham Annex,” Grassley said in a statement, “the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means.”

“We’re Going to Screw Trump”

 Events took a darker turn with the election of Trump as president in November 2016.

On December 9, outgoing President Obama convened a National Security Council meeting to discuss Russian activities related to the recent election. Leaks from the Obama administration were fueling mounting media speculation about Russian influence, with the New York Times and Washington Post (incorrectly) reporting that the intelligence community had concluded that Russia had intervened in the election to help Trump. The Steele Dossier material, while at the time a month away from exploding into public view, was known at high levels of the intelligence community, its authenticity hotly debated among professional analysts. At the meeting, Obama ordered an official intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference.

Obama administration officials were moving to put an official stamp on the Russia affair. Participants at the December 9 meeting included Obama, Comey, McCabe, CIA Director Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence Clapper. They quickly took control of  what typically was a highly technical, cautious, months-long process involving multiple partners in the intelligence community, and in less than three weeks, rushed out an official assessment: Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Donald Trump win the election.

A tsunami hit the nascent Trump presidency with news of the Putin assessment and the bursting into public view of the Steele Dossier via a media leak. Russiagate emerged from the shadows and into the blinding glare of nonstop national news.

But doubts about the motives of key Obama administration players emerged. What was the real story behind Russiagate?

“This was Obama, Comey, Clapper and Brennan deciding ‘We’re going to screw Trump,’” current CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a remarkably frank interview in June with the New York Post’s Miranda Devine.

Ratcliffe spelled out the scheme. “It was, ‘we’re gonna create this [report] and put the imprimatur of an [intelligence community] assessment in a way that nobody can question it.’ They stamped it as Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it. This led to Mueller”—the damaging years-long special counsel inquiry—and “put the seal of approval of the intelligence community that Russia was helping Trump and that the Steele Dossier was the scandal of our lifetime.”

The Ratcliffe interview coincided with the release of a searing new CIA “tradecraft review” of the original 2016 intelligence community assessment. Focusing on the key judgment of the 2016 assessment—that Putin “aspired” to help Trump win the election—the new review is damning.

Major problems plagued the 2016 assessment, the CIA review found. Chief among them was the “excessive involvement of agency heads”—Brennan, Clapper and Comey led the project, shouldering aside other agencies. The direct engagement of agency heads was “highly unusual in both scope and intensity,” the review found. “This exceptional level of senior involvement likely influenced participants, altered normal review processes, and ultimately compromised analytic rigor.”

“The highly compressed timeline” was another serious issue, the review found. It was “atypical for a formal IC [Intelligence Community] assessment, which can take months to prepare, especially for assessments of such length, complexity, and political sensitivity. CIA’s primary authors had less than a week to draft the assessment and less than two days to formally coordinate it with IC peers.”

Inclusion of the Steel Dossier in the assessment was bitterly debated. But the FBI’s Comey pushed for it.

“The decision by agency heads to include the Steele Dossier…ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment,” the review noted. The FBI insisted on its inclusion in the assessment. “FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in [the assessment] hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion.”

Senior CIA managers pushed back, saying the Dossier “did not even meet the most basic tradecraft standards.” Ultimately, a decision was reached to include a two-page summary of the Dossier as an annex to the assessment, and it was referenced in the main body of the report. This “implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment..”

The Ratcliffe tradecraft review was supported a month later with the release of documents by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard released a declassified version of a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report on the Obama-ordered 2016 intelligence community assessment that raised more questions about motives and methods.

Gabbard slammed “a treasonous conspiracy led by President Obama and his national security team,  including James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey to manipulate and manufacture intelligence that promoted a contrived false narrative falsely claiming: ‘Putin aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.’”

The newly released DNI documents, Gabbard said, show how Obama officials created a “contrived narrative” by “manufacturing findings from shoddy sources, suppressing evidence that disproved their false claims, disobeying tradecraft standards, and withholding the truth from the American people.”

The Comey Indictment

 Trump fired Comey in May 2017, soon after taking office. By that time, Comey had been leaking stories about the president in the hope, as he later told Congress, that it “might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” Less than a month after his dismissal, Comey’s wish was granted with the appointment of Robert Mueller to investigate links between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia. Two years later, Mueller ended his probe, finding no collusion between Trump and Russia.

But Comey’s media leaks and Congressional testimony would come back to bite him. The September indictment charges him with lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020 testimony about media leaks related to Russiagate and the Clinton administration.

Comey had already come under scrutiny for media leaks aimed at the Trump administration. A 2019 Justice Department inspector general report sharply rebuked him for “unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information” aimed at triggering a special counsel in the Russiagate affair—an event that came to pass. And an FBI classified leaks investigation, code-named Arctic Haze, added more details of Comey’s use of a cut-out to leak information to the media.

As a stand-alone prosecution, the Comey case faces challenges. But what about the bigger picture, the grave allegations of a “treasonous conspiracy” charged by Gabbard and others?

The outline of a conspiracy exists. The Steele Dossier dirtied Trump up, despite serious reservations about its authenticity from the intelligence community and others. Comey’s FBI dismissed the Clinton classified emails investigation and killed the Clinton Foundation probe, moves that elevated Trump’s chief rival. Comey is on the record as anticipating a Clinton presidency. The FBI cheated on FISA warrants to implicate a Trump ally. The FBI disregarded evidence that the Steele Dossier was paid for by Clinton allies. Top Obama officials—Comey, Brennan, and Clapper—muscled through a damning intelligence community assessment that Putin aspired to help Trump win the election, shutting down opposing views. Comey insisted the Steele Dossier be included in the intelligence community assessment. Comey actively leaked to the media to undermine Trump. Comey acted to force the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Trump.

What would a jury of twelve citizens make of such a case? They might connect the dots. Or was it all just Deep State business as usual, criminal culpability cleverly avoided, blood sport played out at the highest levels for the biggest stakes of all, the presidency? A jury  might recall another Washington scandal mired in tragedy: the Whitewater corruption probe during the Bill Clinton presidential administration and the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster as an investigative train wreck hurtled down the track at him. “Here,” Foster wrote in a suicide note, “ruining people is considered sport.”

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Micah Morrison is chief investigative reporter for Judicial Watch. Tips: mmorrison@judicialwatch.org

Investigative Bulletin is published by Judicial Watch. Reprints and media inquiries: jfarrell@judicialwatch.org

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