Document Dump Reveals More Deep State Treachery Aimed at Trump

Just when you think you've seen it all...

It is impossible to calculate how much precious time was squandered during President Trump’s first term as he and his administration fought off bogus allegations of criminal behavior by the president himself, his family, his closest aides, and his Cabinet members. One can safely argue that the first half of Trump 45—from Inauguration Day through the closing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in April 2019—was incapacitated by internal saboteurs, working hand in glove with the media, to falsely portray Trump as a Russian stooge doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin at the expense of the nation’s security.

The treachery began with the opening of Crossfire Hurricane in July 2016—a multi-national, interagency FBI operation that planted the seeds of bogus Trump-Russia election collusion right before the 2016 presidential election. But recently declassified documents released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, led by longtime investigative reporter John Solomon, reveal the existence of two additional criminal investigations into Trump World intended to result in Trump’s removal from office along with several top officials. And the bureau’s subterfuge continued until the president’s final days in office.

In May 2017, based on nothing more than a letter by two Democratic senators and the FBI’s desire to destroy top Trump officials, the notoriously corrupt Washington (FBI) field office opened a criminal investigation into Attorney General Jeff Sessions for allegedly lying to Congress about his communications with Russian officials. Code named “March Toll” and initiated by the disgraced James Comey a month prior, the investigation centered on Sessions’ Congressional testimony where he (accurately) denied meeting with Russians in 2016 to discuss the presidential campaign. Sessions—who unfortunately recused himself from all Russia related matters on March 2, 2017 under immense pressure from lawmakers and the media—had spoken with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (whom I contend to this day had acted as an informant for the Obama administration, which I covered here in 2019) twice prior to Election Day: once briefly during the Republican National Convention in July 2016 and once during a meeting in his Senate office in September 2016.

Although Sessions insisted his discussions with Kislyak did not involve politics or the campaign, the FBI nonetheless claimed those brief encounters represented “an activity constituting a federal crime or a threat to national security.” The basis for “March Toll,” which began the day after Comey was fired on May 9, 2017, can be found here. Mueller’s office ended the investigation without bringing charges against Sessions on May 8, 2019, two months after the special counsel’s office was shut down. Sessions had resigned in November 2018 after Comey and company succeeded in destroying his reputation; Sessions lost a bid for re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2020.

Comey’s Minions Continued His Bidding After His Overdue Firing

But Sessions—along with Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, and Paul Manafort, the original targets of Crossfire Hurricane—wasn’t the only suspected Russian asset lurking around the White House. A week after Trump fired Comey, two of the FBIs sleaziest characters—FBI general counsel James Baker and FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap—opened “Oxferd Comma,” a criminal investigation into the sitting president of the United States for acting as a Russian agent in booting Comey. “The FBI is opening a full investigation based on an articulable factual basis that reasonably indicates that President Donald J. Trump may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States,” the pair wrote on May 16. (The opening electronic communication is here.)

That same day, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and acting Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, replacing Sessions in all things Russia, met to discuss the probe. That was the same day Rosenstein suggested to McCabe that the feds could “wire him up” to record conversations with the president.

But contrary to the stated reason for “Oxferd Comma,” no “articulable factual basis” existed. The evidence consisted of rehashed allegations in the debunked Steele dossier and a series of “memos” recorded by Comey following private meetings with the president between January and April 2017. Comey, through his bestie Dan Richman, had leaked those memos to the New York Times shortly after he was fired, which resulted in a May 11, 2017 article disclosing details of his conversations with Trump. Comey later admitted he leaked the memos, some of which the DOJ Inspector General later determined had contained classified information, to prompt the appointment of a special counsel.

Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller on May 17, 2017.

More Grist for the ‘Permanent Coup’

Even after the Mueller report landed with a thud two years later—and Mueller’s July 2019 congressional appearance showed a feeble, forgetful geezer with no apparent grasp of the destructive investigation that had proceeded under his name—the FBI figured it had a surefire winner in branding Republican officials and their alleged media supporters as Russian cutouts.

So to cover up for the international crime family known as the Bidens prior to the 2020 election, the FBI concocted another scary Russian plot. “Round River,” a secret counterintelligence operation, claimed the Russians were using “conduits” (Republicans) to smear “targets” (Democrats) with disinformation about Hunter Biden, Burisma, and a host of other family scandals to promote what the FBI called the “Ukraine Narrative.” According to the new documents, the effort was led by the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), created by former FBI Director Chris Wray in 2017 to perpetuate the idea that enemy states, particularly Russia, were successfully meddling in U.S. elections.

Here is an assessment of the operation contained in the latest document dump:

Prior to Election Day, FBI officials gave what they called “defensive briefings” to members of Congress to warn about the latest version of Russian chicanery. Outrageously, the FBI had designated lawmakers including Republican Senators Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson and House Republicans Devin Nunes and James Jordan as Russian “conduits” peddling “disinformation” about the Biden scandals. A spreadsheet, linked here, created by the FBI listed the purported bad guys and their victims.

In fact, the FBI went so far as to dispatch Nikki Flores, head of the FITF, to meet with Grassley and Johnson in August 2020 under the guise of providing a defensive briefing—right before the release of their damning report on Hunter Biden’s financial dealings with foreign countries and companies. But Grassley and Johnson were not fooled. “With respect to the substance of the briefing, it consisted primarily of information that we already knew and information unconnected to our Biden investigation,” they wrote to Floris in 2022, demanding answers about the probe. “We made clear to you at the briefing that it was not relevant to the substance of our work. In response, you stated that the FBI is not attempting to ‘quash, curtail, or interfere’ in the investigation in any way.”

(A few days after the Floris briefing, Lawfare blog ran the first in a series of articles accusing Johnson of acting as an “enabler of Russian disinformation.”)

The latest Transparency Task Force disclosures also include a letter from FBI Director Kash Patel confirming the use of at least 53 confidential human sources (informants) in “Round River,” 14 of whom reported derogatory information about Hunter Biden. “At my direction, this FBI will take the unprecedented step of providing you with the source reporting from all 53 sources so you can finally see the facts,” Patel wrote to the White House this week. He disbanded the FITF last year.

So what does all this mean? It means the treachery of the DOJ and FBI were far worse than anyone imagined, even those of us reporting on it at the time. It means Attorney General Todd Blanche and Patel are still dealing with a systemically corrupt Department of Justice still heavily populated with Comey, Wray, McCabe, and Floris wannabes. It means President Trump was robbed not only of the first two years of his first term but a run for re-election uninhibited by the same bad actors in 2020.

And unfortunately it means they will all get away with it.

More on “Round River” here: