Yet, until the 2020 release of interview transcripts confirmed this fact, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Representative Adam Schiff of California, spent years pretending they were uncovering damning evidence about the president.
If the collusion case was dead by January of 2017, the business of printing dubious collusion stories was alive and well. In fact, 2017 was the year that reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post published a series of stories that would receive their industry’s most coveted award, the Pulitzer Prize.
Among the prizewinning submissions was a report published on February 28, 2017. The Washington Post wrote: “While Trump has derided the dossier as ‘fake news’ compiled by his political opponents, the FBI’s arrangement with Steele shows that the bureau considered him credible and found his information, while unproved, to be worthy of further investigation.”31
Long before the story was published, the FBI had enough evidence to know that Steele and his dossier were not credible. The Post story elaborated that in 2016 “Steele became concerned that the U.S. government was not taking the information he had uncovered seriously enough, according to two people familiar with the situation.”32 Now everyone knows that the government should not have taken his information seriously at all.
Another Post story that helped win the prize was the report published on May 22, 2017, that said Trump had asked intelligence officials “to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.”33 Trump was asking them to state the plain fact that they had seen no collusion evidence. But according to the Post at the time: “Current and former senior intelligence officials viewed Trump’s requests as an attempt by the president to tarnish the credibility of the agency leading the Russia investigation.”34 With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the FBI deserved to have its credibility tarnished.
The Post continued: “Senior intelligence officials also saw the March requests as a threat to the independence of U.S. spy agencies, which are supposed to remain insulated from partisan issues.”35 Is there anything more threatening than a powerful spy agency refusing to be accountable even to the duly elected president of the United States?
The Post saw things differently: “ ‘The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,’ ” a former senior intelligence official said.36 It’s now clear that the real problem was anonymous former senior intelligence officials issuing false statements implying that there was evidence of collusion. Or perhaps the Post was simply misquoting its sources, just as Steele had done with his own anonymous source’s anonymous friends at bars.
Among the New York Times’ prizewinners was a report on April 22, 2017, sharing suspicions about Carter Page’s Russia ties.37 This was after the FBI had secured a third authorization to wiretap him while again failing to disclose to the court his work for the CIA. Two months later the final renewal of the warrant would be enabled by the doctored email concealing his service to the United States.38
In 2018, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger presented reporters from the Times and the Post with their Pulitzer Prizes. The citation reads: “For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”39
The media establishment had essentially congratulated itself for getting duped into supporting a massive abuse of federal power. One of the many sad lessons is that no American can count on even the most celebrated members of the establishment press to shine a light on such abuses.
As for establishment politicians with access to classified intelligence, some chose to back the FBI abuses targeted at Trump associates. “The FBI had ample reason to believe that Carter Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power based on his history…,” claimed Adam Schiff in 2018, long after he should have known this was untrue.40 After being surveilled and damaged in the press for over a year, no charges were ever brought against Carter Page.
In January of that year, Schiff served as the lead author of a memo from intelligence committee Democrats to House colleagues. “FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign,”41 the document falsely claimed. The memo moved on to further deceptions, claiming that the “DOJ cited multiple sources to support the case for surveilling Page—but made only narrow use of information from Steele’s sources.… DOJ told the Court the truth. Its representation was consistent with the FBI’s underlying investigative record, which current and former senior officials later corroborated in extensive Committee testimony.”42
The Court does not agree, and neither does the Obama-appointed inspector general who investigated the matter.
Schiff’s whoppers continued in the 2018 memo: “DOJ’s warrant request was based on compelling evidence and probable cause to believe Page was knowingly assisting clandestine Russian intelligence activities in the U.S.” We now know that the FBI’s evidence was falsified when it wasn’t hidden. Schiff wasn’t finished misleading the public. His memo stated, “DOJ provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”43 This is false and was known to be false at the moment Schiff wrote it.
Yet Representative Schiff was just beginning his campaign of deception. He would continue pretending for years to have seen “more than circumstantial evidence” of collusion while delaying the release of investigative records showing he hadn’t found any. In the spring of 2020 he
