(Roger Stone) Special Counsel John Durham’s final report on the origins of the Russian collusion hoax (also known as Obamagate) document the single greatest dirty trick in the history of American politics and government; an abuse of power in which the full authority and extraordinary intelligence capabilities of the United States government were illicitly and illegally used to remove a duly elected President — Donald J. Trump — from office.
Contrary to the completely politicized and undocumented claims of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report, as well as the feeble assertions of the Mueller investigation; neither the FBI or the CIA had any evidence whatsoever of collusion between any Russian entity and Donald Trump’s campaign for President.
Importantly, Durham established that there was an Oval Office meeting that included President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in which the lack of any actual evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign and Hillary Clinton’s promulgation of this false narrative to the intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and the media, was established. This is precisely why this scandal is sometimes referred to as “Obamagate.”
Specifically Durham’s report says, “What the FBI knew from its intelligence collections as of early 2017. As the record reflects, as of early 2017, the FBI still did not possess any intelligence showing that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was in contact with Russian intelligence officers during the campaign.”
Indeed, based on declassified documents from early 2017, the FBI’s own records show that reports published by The New York Times in February and March 2017 concerning what four unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials claimed about Trump campaign personnel being in touch with any Russian intelligence officers was untrue.
These unidentified sources reportedly stated that (i) U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted communications of members of Trump’s campaign and other Trump associates that showed repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election; (ii) former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had been one of the individuals picked up on the intercepted “calls;” and (iii) the intercepted communications between Trump associates and Russians had been initially captured by the NSA.
However, official FBI documentation reflects that all three of these highly concerning claims of Trump-related contacts with Russian intelligence were untrue. Indeed, in a contemporaneous critique of the Times article prepared by Peter Strzok, who was steeped in the details of Crossfire Hurricane, all three of the above-referenced allegations were explicitly refuted. Strzok’s evaluation of the allegations included the following:
- The FBI had not seen any evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with Russian intelligence officers. He characterized this allegation as misleading and inaccurate as written. He noted that there had been some individuals in contact with Russians, both governmental and non-governmental, but none of these individuals had an affiliation with Russian intelligence. He also noted previous contact between Carter Page and a Russian intelligence officer, but this contact did not occur during Page’s association with the Trump campaign.
- The FBI had no information in its holdings, nor had it received any such information from other members of the Intelligence Community, that Paul Manafort had been a party to a call with any Russian government official. Strzok noted that the Intelligence Community had not provided the FBI with any such information even though the FBI had advised certain agencies of its interest in anything they might hold or collect regarding Manafort.
- Regarding the allegation that the NSA initially captured these communications between Trump campaign officials and Trump associates and the Russians, Strzok repeated that if such communications had been collected by the NSA, the FBI was not aware of that fact.”
As investigative reporter John Leake wrote in The Patriot Sentinel, “In other words, in its Russian-Collusion reporting, the New York Times published assertions from “four unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials” that were entirely false. Thus, the practice of using “unidentified sources”—a practice that was once heavily frowned upon by respectable journalists—enabled the commission of a giant deception that inflicted untold damage to our political system.”
Even at that time (in early 2017) Leake wrote, “that it was possible to take down a sitting President of the United States by publishing the assertions of anonymous sources from within the state bureaucracy, then our government by elected officials was over, and our true masters were the unnamed intelligence officials.”
Federal officials, including CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein all knew that the so-called “Steele Dossier,” which alleged that Donald Trump had been entertained by “Russian prostitutes urinating on a bed once occupied by President Obama in a Moscow hotel suite,” were entirely unsubstantiated and false.
Nonetheless, these false allegations were used not only to rationalize the launch of the FBI’s counterintelligence effort, “Crossfire Hurricane,” but also to justify the bogus FISA warrant which allowed the FBI to spy on Donald Trump, and members of his campaign, when he was President-elect, and, again, when he was President.
Strangely enough, Durham never investigated or addressed false allegations that the DNC computer servers were the target of an online hack by Russian intelligence operatives. The FBI actually admitted in my trial that they had never actually inspected the DNC computer servers, relying instead on the assertions of CrowdStrike, a Democrat forensic IT firm whose “report” alleged this act by “the Russians.”
Interestingly, the CrowdStrike report was withheld from my defense attorneys at trial— although CrowdStrike Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry, who conveniently happens to be a former deputy to FBI Director Robert Mueller, admitted under oath to the House Intelligence Committee that the report contained no proof whatsoever that the Russians hacked the DNC, obtaining the embarrassing chain of e-mails published by WikiLeaks.
