We call these leaks deceptive because the search for collusion evidence had come up dry despite aggressive and illegal efforts by FBI officials to procure such evidence. Yet the flood of selective leaks, packaged for media consumption, suggested a rising mountain of proof of Trump treachery. Compliant reporters, anchors, and pundits took it from there, citing anonymous sources and weaving dark tales of walls closing in around an embattled president.
We don’t think well of people who mislead us, but for some reason many in our industry have decided not to turn on the sources who fed them a massive deception. Johnson correctly notes that even if the leakers remain anonymous to the public, leak recipients in the press corps clearly know who they are. He points out that leaks were routed “to 18 different outlets. And I haven’t seen too much investigation, reporting, or investigatory reporting, from the media in terms of how they were either duped or complicit in this corruption of the transition process.”4
Attorney General William Barr states: “It’s been stunning that all we have gotten from the mainstream media is sort of bovine silence in the face of the complete collapse of the so-called Russiagate scandal, which they did all they could to sensationalize and drive.
“And it’s like not even a ‘whoops,’ ” he continued. “They are just on to the next false scandal.”
Barr adds that it “has been surprising to me that people aren’t concerned about civil liberties and the integrity of our governmental process.”5
What follows is the story of the historic corruption and abuse of federal power, enabled and encouraged by news organizations that abandoned journalistic principle in the pursuit of ideological ends.
In 2016, supporters of Hillary Clinton began circulating a bogus dossier of smears alleging that Trump had been compromised by the Russian government. The creation of the dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee during a presidential election year. They used a law firm called Perkins Coie, which hired a company called Fusion GPS to build the dossier against their opponent. The author of the dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele, was staunchly opposed to Trump. Steele’s information came from a “Primary Sub-source” who by 2017 had told FBI agents that some of the most sensational claims were simply made in “jest.”6
This effort to brand Clinton’s opponent a traitor didn’t prevent her defeat in the 2016 presidential race. But it helped inspire Trump’s adversaries in Washington to turn the national security machinery of the federal government against American citizens participating in politics. To employ the surveillance tools usually reserved for terrorists and other foreign enemies against an associate of Donald J. Trump, U.S. government officials committed a series of frauds upon a federal court and the American people.
It would take until December 2019—almost three full years into Trump’s presidential term—for the Justice Department’s inspector general to lay out Steele’s connections to Russian oligarchs. This information had been sitting in the FBI’s own files but was ignored in the quest to make a collusion case against Trump. Not until April 2020 did the public learn that even before Trump took office the FBI began receiving intelligence reports saying not only that key dossier claims were false but that they had been invented by the Russian government.7 After years of political warfare fueled by accusations against Trump, the U.S. election meddler with Russia ties turned out to be Hillary Clinton.
This doesn’t mean that anyone should “lock her up.” It may be immoral but it’s not illegal to share self-serving unverified rumors with the FBI and urge an investigation to determine if your political rival is conspiring with a foreign government. The greatest fault lies with those in government who accepted this reckless partisan scheme and used it to assault the U.S. political system and individual liberty. It’s time for a reckoning to ensure this never happens again.
Director James Comey’s Federal Bureau of Investigation said that it officially began targeting Trump campaign associates in July 2016 with the opening of a case called “Crossfire Hurricane.” We say “officially” because it is unlikely that that was the true start of the investigation, as we’ll discuss later. What’s not in dispute is that, almost thirty-two months later, special counsel Robert Mueller reported to the Justice Department that he’d found no evidence of anyone in the Trump campaign colluding with Russians.
The absence of evidence wasn’t for lack of trying by the special counsel. Mueller took over the Russia investigation in May 2017 after Comey’s firing sparked calls for an independent inquiry. Mueller stacked his team with activist Democrats, including generous donors to Obama and Clinton campaigns and staff who had been promoting the collusion narrative long before they went to work for Mueller. In May 2020 an embarrassed Biden for President campaign would cancel a fundraiser featuring top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann. But it was too late to hide the fact that Trump had been investigated by ideological opponents.
What’s also now clear is that, months before Mueller was hired in 2017 and before Trump was even inaugurated, FBI officials already knew they had no collusion case. Richard Grenell, as acting director of national intelligence in 2020, declassified voluminous witness testimony proving the government never had any collusion evidence. Says Grenell: “The Russian investigation had all sorts of red flags from the beginning and when you look at the transcripts, when you look at the declassified footnotes from some of the investigations, it’s clear that there were multiple people from multiple agencies that were raising red flags. However… those red flags and those voices were pushed aside, classified, and never shown
