FBI Director Kash Patel found a damning memo written in October 2017 that details the timeline of the probes into twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's alleged pay-to-play scheme.

It is clear from the heavily redacted memo, which was first obtained by Just the News, that the investigations into Clinton's alleged scheme — set in motion following the publication of Governmental Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer's bestselling book "Clinton Cash" — appear to have been brought to a screeching halt by then-Obama Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates with the help of other Justice Department and FBI officials.

Background

Hillary Clinton dealt with two particularly big scandals in 2016 before her humiliating electoral defeat.

One of the scandals concerned her use of a personal email system for official communications during her time as Obama's first secretary of state.

Authorities reportedly found hundreds of emails on her private system — which was vulnerable to hacking and enabled her to go off-the-books with her official engagements — containing classified information. Eight email chains were allegedly found to contain Top Secret information; 36 chains allegedly contained Secret information; and eight allegedly contained Confidential information.

The second scandal, which was brought to the nation's attention thanks to Schweizer's book, concerned the Clintons' alleged pay-to-play and bribery scheme, where big-time donors to the Clinton Foundation reportedly frequently found themselves materially benefiting from actions taken by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state.

The 2017 FBI memo

The memo recently secured by Patel indicates that on Feb. 1, 2016 — just days after FBI agents at field offices in New York, Arkansas, and the District of Columbia launched investigations into the Clinton Foundation regarding the allegations in Schweizer's book — the Obama Justice Department indicated that "they would not be supportive of a FBI investigation."

Photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo/FilmMagic

The FBI timeline indicates that 16 days later, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe "directed that no overt investigative steps were to be taken on the CF investigation without his approval."

The Durham report previously revealed that in February, McCabe — who had a possible conflict of interest and was described by one former FBI official as being "annoyed" and "angry" at the time — apparently leaned on the field agents to close their cases and that those restrictions on overt investigative activities remained in place for several months.

When speaking on Thursday to Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck about the significance of the revelations, Schweizer, who confirmed he worked with the FBI as a confidential informant, expressed his admiration for the FBI field agents who tried to hold Clinton accountable.

"I can't speak highly enough of them," said Schweizer. "They doggedly continued those investigations because they saw how much smoke and fire was actually there."

Despite agents being well-positioned to continue digging — particularly those at the Little Rock field office — FBI leaders continued to set up roadblocks, prohibiting agents from taking additional "investigative steps" or from reaching out to new confidential human sources.

Sally Yates. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The FBI memo indicated that sometime around March 2016, Sally Yates apparently ordered the U.S. attorney's office in the Eastern District of Arkansas to "shut it down."

'The deep state is really becoming clear right now.'

Schweizer told Beck that Yates' purported order was "highly, highly, highly unusual because field offices are supposed to organically follow leads and investigate, and to have the headquarters shut down an investigation on somebody as important as the Clintons ... speaks of course of the problems of the deep state that you highlighted for so many years."

— (@)

Months after Yates allegedly spiked the Arkansas investigation into the Clinton Foundation, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and Eastern District of New York made clear they "would not support the investigation" and apparently provided no explanation as to why.

"The deep state is really becoming clear right now," said Glenn Beck.

Additional insights

The Durham annex that was declassified by CIA Director John Ratcliffe last month provided insights into the alleged effort by former President Barack Obama to simultaneously protect his legacy and spare Clinton from accountability.

Russian intelligence services apparently hacked and gained access to the emails of a number of American government entities, nonprofit organizations, and think tanks ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Among the organizations allegedly hacked by Russian actors was Democratic mega-donor George Soros' Open Society Foundations.

A source shared with the FBI some of the intelligence gathered in these hacks — including purported emails between then-Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and two individuals at George Soros' Open Society Foundations, Jeffrey Goldstein and Leonard Benardo — the latter of whom just hid his tweets on X.

The source conveyed this information to the feds in two memos, one in January 2016 and the second in March 2016.

The first memo indicated on the basis of alleged communications between Schultz and Benardo that former President Barack Obama apparently sought to torpedo the FBI's investigation into the pay-to-play scheme that Hillary Clinton allegedly ran while secretary of state for fear of the scandal staining his legacy.

According to the second memo, Schultz confided in Benardo that Obama "sanctioned the use of all administrative levers to remove possibly negative effects from the FBI investigation of cases related to the Clinton Foundation and the email correspondence in the State Department."

Blaze News reached out to Schultz and to Obama's office for comment.

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Dem whistleblower went to FBI about Schiff's alleged 'treasonous' role in Russia hoax — but DOJ ignored him: Report

The newly declassified Durham annex released by CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed last month that the intelligence community was aware in 2016 of an alleged Clinton campaign plan to smear Trump, falsely link him to Russia, then have the deep state carry the ball down the field.

The newly declassified House Intelligence Committee majority staff report released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revealed that the consequential January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment appeared to be a work of fiction drawn up by the Obama administration that served to give the Clinton campaign's narrative a patina of legitimacy and set the stage for years of attacks and two congressional impeachments.

While these documents made clear that the intelligence community and the liberal media played critical roles in the hoax, newly released FBI memos highlight they had a helping hand from Congress.

'SCHIFF stated the information would be used to Indict President Trump.'

FBI 302 interview reports provided to Congress by FBI Director Kash Patel and obtained by Just the News detail allegations that beginning in 2017, then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) approved leaking classified information to undermine President Donald Trump and push the Russia hoax.

The whistleblower — a Democratic career intelligence officer who worked for the Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for over a decade and considered Schiff a friend — raised concerns about the Democratic lawmaker's actions as early as 2017.

While working with the committee, the whistleblower attended a February 2017 meeting where Schiff "stated the group would leak classified information which was derogatory to President of the United States Donald J. TRUMP. SCHIFF stated the information would be used to Indict President Trump," said the FBI interview report.

William B. Plowman/NBC via Getty Images

"[Redacted] stated this would be illegal and, upon hearing his concerns, unnamed members of the meeting reassured [redacted] that they would not be caught leaking classified information," continued the document.

The whistleblower alleged that this was "not a one-time thing" but "rampant" and that damaging notes would be floated to Schiff "after which a decision was made as to who would leak the information," said an FBI memo.

'SWALWELL previously had been warned to be careful because he had a reputation for leaking classified information.'

When the information was leaked to the media, it was apparently flagged "on background," meaning that the information would be published without a reference to the source. The interview report singles out NBC News as one of the outlets in contact with the committee offices.

There was one particular leak that struck the whistleblower as particularly egregious. He told the FBI that in early 2017, "a particularly sensitive document" was viewed by a small contingent of staff along with Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.).

"Within 24 hours, the information appeared in the news almost verbatim and [redacted] officials descended upon HPSCI's offices, threatening to stop providing information unless the leaking ended," said the report. "[Redacted] suspected that SWALWELL played a role in the leak and noted that SWALWELL previously had been warned to be careful because he had a reputation for leaking classified information."

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The whistleblower suggested that this alleged leaking operation was energized by Schiff's fury over Trump's win "as he believed he would have been appointed as Director of CIA had HILLARY CLINTON won the election," said the interview report.

Schiff was allegedly desperate to push the "Russian involvement" narrative into something akin to the 9/11 Commission, and the purpose of the classified information leaks was apparently to "compel public opinion."

Schiff — who also pushed bogus claims from the Steele dossier in Congress around the time of this alleged leak campaign — was long suspected of leaking classified information.

Ex-CIA Director Mike Pompeo publicly accused Schiff in 2023 of doing so, noting that when information was provided to the then-Democratic congressman and his staff, that information found its way into places where it did not belong "with alarming regularity."

After determining that this activity was "unethical and treasonous," the whistleblower reportedly went to the FBI to raise his concerns.

Despite the bureau briefly humoring his concerns, the whistleblower was ultimately informed that "the issue would not be investigated further by the DOJ, as Congressmen have immunity to all speech and actions made on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives."

Under new leadership, the Justice Department may take greater interest even though the alleged leaks likely fall outside the statute of limitations for prosecution.

"We found it. We declassified it," Patel noted on X with regards to the FBI interview memos. "Now Congress can see how classified info was leaked to shape political narratives — and decide if our institutions were weaponized against the American people."

"For years, certain officials used their positions to selectively leak classified information to shape political narratives," Patel told Just the News. "It was all done with one purpose: to weaponize intelligence and law enforcement for political gain."

"The FBI will now lead the charge, with our partners at DOJ, and Congress will have the chance to uncover how political power may have been weaponized and to restore accountability," added Patel.

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Trump's CIA director has bad news for Hillary Clinton regarding alleged 'treasonous conspiracy'

President Donald Trump acknowledged on Friday that former President Barack Obama is likely to dodge accountability for his role in the Russian collusion hoax on account of the U.S. Supreme Court's July 1, 2024, immunity for official acts ruling in Trump v. United States.

Trump suggested, however, that the high court's ruling "doesn't help the people around him at all" — an allusion to those Obama cabalists who hatched, then perpetuated the Russian collusion hoax on the American people.

The FBI has, for instance, launched a criminal investigation into ex-CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey for perjury and potentially other crimes related to the Trump-Russia hoax. Former DNI James Clapper indicated he would "lawyer up" after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard referred damning documents detailing the genesis of the hoax's manufacture under Obama to the Department of Justice.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe hinted Sunday that twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton might also face the music over her apparent hand in what Gabbard has referred to as an alleged "treasonous conspiracy."

Quick recap

Ratcliffe ordered a review in May of the "procedures and analytic tradecraft employed" when drafting the January 2017 intelligence Community Assessment, a document created at Obama's urging that served as the cornerstone of the Russian collusion hoax and set the stage for arrests, impeachments, and years of politically expedient smears.

Late last month, Ratcliffe released the findings of that review, noting that there were "multiple procedural anomalies" in the production of the January 2017 ICA, including "a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive involvement of agency heads."

Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The memo noted further that the Obama administration sacrificed analytical soundness in the interest of "narrative consistency."

More has since been revealed about the genesis of the hoax thanks in part to Gabbard's publication of a damning House Intelligence Committee majority staff report.

The previously classified House report confirmed that: the ICA was a work of fiction drawn up by the Obama administration with the aim of kneecapping the democratically elected Republican president; credible evidence available in January 2017 contradicted the narrative advanced in the ICA; and that contrary to Brennan's suggestion in public and sworn testimonies, the Steele dossier — a political opposition research report paid for in part by the Clinton campaign — was included in the ICA.

Clinton might take another tumble

Ratcliffe suggested on Sunday that additional documents link Clinton to the development of the Russian collusion hoax.

"Part of what came out last week was about how John Brennan, Clapper, Comey, they all pushed the known-fake Steele dossier into intelligence community assessments and as the basis for Crossfire Hurricane and all that," he told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo. "But what hasn't come out yet, and what's going to come out, is the underlying intelligence that I have spent the last few months making recommendations about final declassification — and sent that to the Department of Justice. That will come out in the John Durham report classified annex."

'US intelligence intercepted Russian intelligence talking about a Hillary Clinton plan.'

The first Trump DOJ authorized federal prosecutor John Durham in 2019 to explore the origins of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI's investigation into the supposed Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Durham, who was elevated to special counsel in December 2020, found that:

the FBI utilized "raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence" to open the investigation into the Trump campaign but did not follow the same standard when approaching alleged election interference in relation to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign;
the FBI “did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations" made in the Steele dossier of lurid accusations against then-candidate Donald Trump;
"neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation"; and
the FBI used the unvetted and unverified Steele reports just days after their receipt "to support probable cause in the FBI’s FISA applications targeting [Carter] Page, a U.S. citizen who, for a period of time, had been an adviser to Trump."

While a 306-page unclassified report detailing these and other conclusions was released in May 2023, there was a 29-page classified appendix that the public never saw.

A White House source confirmed to Blaze News that "the CIA is declassifying that report in the name of transparency."

The CIA director told Bartiromo, "In the summer of 2016, U.S. intelligence intercepted Russian intelligence talking about a Hillary Clinton plan — a Hillary Clinton plan to falsely accuse Donald Trump of Russia collusion; to vilify and smear him with what would become known infamously as the Steele dossier."

'They conspired against the American people.'

"This intelligence was so explosive that John Brennan briefed President Obama, Vice President Biden, Jim Clapper, James Comey, the entire national security team, telling them about this Hillary Clinton plan," said Ratcliffe. "That was in August of 2016 and yet it wasn't until more than four years later, in October of 2020, when I found after an exhaustive search John Brennan's handwritten notes and the underlying intelligence behind it that revealed exactly what happened."

Rather than expose the "Clinton plan," which is taken up at length in the Durham report, the Obama administration apparently used it as a framework.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Citing notes from Brennan, which Ratcliffe declassified in 2020 while serving as DNI, the Durham report indicated that intelligence agencies "obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee."

The report emphasized the Clinton plan intelligence was relevant for two reasons:

"first, the Clinton plan intelligence itself and on its face arguably suggested that private actors affiliated with the Clinton campaign were seeking in 2016 to promote a false or exaggerated narrative to the public and to U.S. government agencies about Trump's possible ties to Russia"; and
second, "the Clinton plan intelligence had potential bearing on the reliability and credibility" on the materials provided and funded by the Clinton campaign and/or the DNC used by the FBI when seeking FISA warrants and taking other investigative steps.

According to the Durham report, there was no evidence that the FBI disclosed the contents of the Clinton plan intelligence to the attorneys working on the FISA matters related to Crossfire Hurricane, to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or to numerous individuals working on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Ratcliffe indicated on Sunday that the declassified Durham report appendix will show that "part of this was a Hillary Clinton plan but part of it was an FBI plan to be an accelerant to that fake Steele dossier, to those fake Russia collusion claims by pouring oil on the fire, by amplifying the lie and burying the truth of what Hillary Clinton was up to."

The CIA director noted on Sunday that Clinton, like Brennan and Comey, testified on the subject under oath in recent years, and that "much of that testimony is, frankly, completely inconsistent with what our underlying intelligence that is about to be declassified in the Durham Annex, what that reflects."

Ratcliffe hinted at legal consequences for Clinton, noting, "Pam Bondi does have a strike force. It is a different Department of Justice, a different FBI, and an opportunity to look at how these people really did conspire to run a hoax, a fraud on the American people and against Donald Trump’s presidency."

The Department of Justice declined to comment.

"There is no doubt in my mind that the people that we just talked about conspired. They conspired against President Trump. They conspired against the American people," added Ratcliffe.

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John Brennan’s 5 Lies That Set Russiagate In Motion

Brennan’s purported intelligence was so flimsy and comically absurd that it only further exposes the fraudulent nature of the assessment.

Over target: Panicked liberal media attacks Gabbard's 'treasonous conspiracy' claim

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard published a report on Wednesday that appeared to confirm the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference was a work of fiction comprising misquotes, unreliable reports, lies of omissions, and straight-out falsehoods.

Rather than admit fault or come to terms with the role it played in perpetuating an apparent hoax on the American people — one that set the stage for years of Russian-collusion smears, two congressional impeachments, multiple arrests, and greater tensions with a pre-eminent nuclear power — the liberal media is now desperately trying to both downplay the gravity of the newly declassified House Intelligence Committee majority staff report and spin the conclusions therein.

Refresher

The House Intelligence Committee report is a product of congressional investigators spending over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports, conducting dozens of interviews, and comparing the ICA analytic tradecraft against well-established intelligence reports.

According to the report, the intelligence community had no credible evidence of Russia working to help Trump win.

What's more, the report — which Gabbard indicated provides evidence of a "treasonous conspiracy" — claimed that the ICA, which was released by the Obama administration just weeks before President Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017:

incorporated dubious claims despite high-level protest within the intelligence community;
leaned on the bogus Steele dossier while failing to mention it was produced in part for the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign and had Russian links;
omitted narrative-killing evidence such as Moscow's withholding of damning information about Hillary Clinton's health issues, which if released could have helped Trump; and
propped the narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aspired" to help Trump win on "one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence" from a "substandard report" that CIA officers initially omitted but were ordered by then-CIA Director John Brennan to include despite protest.

The report also indicates that the Obama administration leaked falsehoods from the ICA to the media, which publications like the Washington Post dutifully printed.

Liberal media turns on another gaslight

CNN's Kaitlan Collins did her apparent best on Wednesday to distract from the damning contents of the report by making its release about an imagined interpersonal drama between the president and his director of national intelligence.

'Who was saying that?'

Photo (left): Kevin Dietsch/Getty Image; Photo (right): Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Collins suggested in question form that Gabbard was "only releasing these documents now to improve [her] standing with the president after he said that [her] intelligence assessments were wrong," referencing Trump's assertion last month that Gabbard was wrong in suggesting there was no evidence that Iran was constructing a nuclear weapon.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt asked Collins, "Who was saying that?"

Leavitt later added, "The only people who are suggesting that the director of national intelligence would release evidence to try to boost her standing with the president are the people in this room, who constantly try to sow distrust and chaos amongst the president’s Cabinet, and it is not working."

The Washington Post, one of the chief proponents of the Russian collusion narrative, appears to have adopted a different strategy in attacking the report and its credibility.

Earlier in the week, the Post pushed an article asserting that Gabbard's "seditious conspiracy" claim is "based on thin gruel."

The article strategically assigned greater weight to the conclusions of previous investigations, including the Senate Intelligence Committee's multi-volume report on the ICA, which "found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election," and that "Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process."

Sarah Bedford of the Washington Examiner noted that the problem with Democrats and the media using conclusions of the Senate Intelligence Committee report to contradict the newly declassified House report and Gabbard's corresponding claims is "it's not clear that the Senate had the same level of access to source material" that CIA Director [John Ratcliffe] now has."

"The conclusions about the Steele dossier not being a significant source for the ICA and about the CIA not wanting it included, for example, appear to come from interviews," continued Bedford. "Brennan just denied again that he wanted it in the ICA when the committee interviewed him in 2018. But Ratcliffe's memo is based on actual emails from 2016, which tell a completely different story."

Bedford was referencing the declassified memo released last month by Ratcliffe, which criticized the 2017 ICA and identified "multiple procedural anomalies" in its preparation.

— (@)

The Associated Press effectively told its readers not to believe their lying eyes in an article titled "Gabbard's claims of an anti-Trump conspiracy are not supported by declassified documents."

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Like the Post, the AP leaned on the Senate Intelligence Committee's report to suggest there were no politically motivated aspects in the Obama administration's assessments, but it also refuted arguments that Gabbard did not appear to be making.

Gabbard told Fox News that there "was a shift, a 180-degree shift, from the intelligence community’s assessment leading up to the election to the one that President Obama directed be produced after Donald Trump won the election that completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously."

Gabbard was referencing how the ICA concluded in early January 2017 that Russia was trying to boost Trump — yet just weeks earlier, the FBI's director of counterintelligence and the DNI's national intelligence officer made no such claim in their briefing to Congress on Vladimir Putin's supposed leak operations.

The AP insinuated, however, that Gabbard was alternatively referring to the intelligence community's consistent view that there were Russian efforts to manipulate the vote count and concluded "there was no shift."

Despite the article's framing, the AP acknowledged that "the material declassified this week reveals some dissent within the intelligence community about whether Putin wanted to help Trump or simply inflame the U.S."; however, the AP suggested that the dissent detailed in the House report was business as usual and glossed over the fact that the debate concerned violations of analytic tradecraft standards and the inclusion of unreliable or false information.

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Report: Russia Hoax Was Built On ‘One Scant, Unclear, And Unverifiable Fragment Of A Sentence’

CIA officers warned Brennan about the shoddy nature of the sentence fragment, and initially omitted the fragment in the report. But Brennan personally demanded the fragment be included.

Obama and Brennan set to reap the whirlwind: Gabbard refers evidence of 'years-long coup' to DOJ for criminal probe

The January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment regarding imagined Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election set the stage for years of Russian-collusion smears, two congressional impeachments, multiple arrests, and a costly years-long investigation. It also helped further sour the relationship between the world's top two nuclear powers.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard published on Wednesday an eye-opening House Intelligence Committee majority staff report, which confirms the ICA was a work of fiction drawn up by the Obama administration with the aim of kneecapping the democratically elected Republican president — a fiction that Democrats like Sen. Adam Schiff (Calif.) and their friends in the liberal media were more than happy to treat as gospel truth.

Gabbard told reporters during Wednesday's White House press briefing that she has referred the documents to the Department of Justice and FBI so that they can "investigate the criminal implications."

Gabbard noted that the newly declassified report "exposes how the Obama Administration manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election."

"In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people, working with their partners in the media to promote the lie, in order to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump, essentially enacting a years-long coup against him," the director added.

Gabbard certainly did not oversell the damning nature of the report and its findings.

After comparing the ICA analytic tradecraft against well-established intelligence community standards, spending over 2,300 hours reviewing the ICA and its source reports, and conducting numerous interviews, congressional investigators concluded that the Obama administration's assessment:

Misrepresented reports that vociferous Trump critic and then-CIA Director John Brennan had ordered the publication of "as reliable, without mentioning their significant underlying flaws";
"Ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged — and in some cases undermined — judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump";
Violated analytic standards when citing British ex-spy Christopher Steele's dossier — a political opposition research report paid for in part by the Clinton campaign that Brennan included in the ICA despite high-level credibility concerns and internal opposition;
Propped the narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin "aspired" to help Trump win on "one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence" from a "substandard report" that CIA officers initially omitted but were ordered by Brennan to include despite protest;
Failed to consider alternative explanations of Putin's intentions indicated by intelligence that was actually reliable;
Was written by five CIA analysts handpicked by Brennan; and
Was rushed out by Brennan "in order to publish two weeks before President-elect Trump was sworn in."

The disparity between the raw intelligence available to the Obama administration at the time and what was ultimately presented in the ICA is jarring.

For instance, the 2017 assessment stated: "As early as February 2016, a Russian political expert possessed a plan that recommended engagement with [Trump's] team because of the prospects for improved U.S.-Russian relations, according to reporting from [redacted] government service."

'Critical information that undermined source credibility and veracity of key reporting was omitted from both the ICA text and the subsequent briefings.'

The ICA failed to mention that this supposed plan "was just an email with no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification."

The relevant raw intelligence came with this context warning: "The CIA can neither independently vouch for [redacted] vetting or validation of the ultimate source nor the ultimate source's access to the reported information. The document contains no classification. The document did not carry a specific date or identify the originator."

— (@)

The Obama administration was evidently so desperate to paint Trump as Putin's man that they apparently neglected to mention that:

A longtime Putin confidant told a sensitive contact both that he did not care who won the election and that "Russia was strategically placed to outmaneuver either one";
Reliable evidenced showed key Putin advisers saw significant downsides to a Trump presidency; and
Russia withheld compromising material about failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with the possible intent to exploit it once she was in office.

"Significant reports cited in support of judgments of Putin's intentions were not quoted accurately, were not quoted in context, or were selectively quoted to omit evidence that undermined ICA major judgments," the report said. "Moreover, critical information that undermined source credibility and veracity of key reporting was omitted from both the ICA text and the subsequent briefings of the document to the President-elect, the U.S. Congress, and the White House staff."

Congressional investigators found some of the apparent lies of omission and flat-out lies in the ICA particularly egregious.

The report noted that in the case of the Steele dossier, the ICA "claimed the source 'collected this information on behalf of private clients' while failing to note those clients — the DNC and the Clinton campaign — were Candidate Trump's political opponents, information known to the FBI at the time."

In addition to this intentional omission "based on analysis of the testimony of Steele's FBI handler, Fusion GPS officials, and media exposures of the relationship," the ICA "also excluded that the political messaging firm that hired the dossier author, Fusion GPS, was also working on behalf of Russian interests to uncover information that was shared with the Kremlin, raising serious counterintelligence concerns over possible Russian influence on the dossier," the report said.

'To this day, our country is more polarized than ever before, and the Russia hoax played a role in that.'

In early December 2016, the FBI's director of counterintelligence and the DNI's national intelligence officer for Russia briefed Congress on Putin's supposed leak operations but made no mention of the foreign leader aspiring to elect Trump. However, Obama weighed in on Dec. 6, 2016, reportedly ordering a rewrite of the intelligence community's assessments.

A month later, Obama's underlings allegedly came up with a product Democrats would exploit nearly a decade.

Had Trump not retaken the White House, such findings may have never come to light, which might explain the fanatic support for Kamala Harris expressed by some of those implicated in the documents.

Gabbard, who underscored during the White House press conference the leading role former President Barack Obama took in this alleged "treasonous conspiracy," emphasized on X that "the Russia Hoax was a lie that was knowingly created by the Obama Administration to undermine the legitimacy and power of the duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump."

Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.), who is the current chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in response to the report, "The Russia hoax will go down as one of the most troublesome events in U.S. history."

"A President of the United States was falsely accused, and a nation had to endure lies fabricated by rogue personnel within their own Intelligence Community," continued Crawford. "To this day, our country is more polarized than ever before, and the Russia hoax played a role in that."

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From Obama to CNN: How the liberal media helped facilitate the 'treasonous conspiracy' about Russian collusion

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has released a treasure trove of evidence revealing how former President Barack Obama and his national security Cabinet members had, as many long suspected, apparently "manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump."

Both before and after the 2016 election, the understanding among intelligence officials appears to have been that Russia had likely not interfered, particularly by using cyber means, to influence the outcome.

Gabbard revealed, however, that before this conclusion could be delivered to the American public, the Obama White House seemingly intervened to set an alternative narrative — a narrative largely based on the Steele dossier, a political opposition research report paid for in part by the Clinton campaign, which the intelligence community knew to be devoid of credibility.

'They weren't in Russia; they never made a phone call to Russia; they never received a phone call.'

This false narrative, which was initially fed piecemeal through leaks to the liberal media and then officially advanced through a reworked intelligence assessment published on Jan. 6, 2017, served "as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high-level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened U.S.-Russia tensions, and more," Gabbard said.

The success of what Gabbard characterized as a "treasonous conspiracy" was largely reliant on the participation of the liberal media, whose assistance took on various forms but in some cases was as simple as framing unnamed partisan sources from the previous administration not only as credible but noble.

For instance, in March 2017, the New York Times explained away Obama officials' eagerness to push the Russian collusion narrative before President Donald Trump took office not as an attempt to "make an excuse for their own defeat in the election," as then-White House spokesman Sean Spicer put it, but rather as a heroic effort to protect legitimate intelligence from obfuscation or destruction:

Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested that American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration. At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump's statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.

This explanation was followed paragraphs later by the claim that Obama directed none of the efforts.

Photo by Saul Loeb - Pool/Getty Images

One month prior, Trump — whose transition team emphasized early on that the intelligence agencies alleging Russian interference were "the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction" — called the Russia narrative a "scam."

"You can talk all you want about Russia, which was all a, you know, fake news, fabricated deal, to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats, and the press plays right into it," Trump said during a Feb. 16, 2017, press conference. "In fact, I saw a couple of the people that were supposedly involved with all of this — that they know nothing about it; they weren't in Russia; they never made a phone call to Russia; they never received a phone call."

The Poynter Institute's PolitiFact, among the publications that made good use of the reworked intelligence assessment, leaned on the apparently Obama-skewed document when insinuating that Trump's remarks at the press conference were false.

The Washington Post, which was among the biggest media proponents of the hoax, readily and routinely leaned on the input and framing of fierce Trump critics, including those apparently involved in the manufacture of the Russian collusion hoax, such as ex-CIA Director John Brennan.

In its long-standing effort to portray Trump as guilty and defensive, the paper also tracked how many times the president and those in the White House denied Russian collusion.

'The integrity of our democratic republic demands that every person involved be investigated and brought to justice to prevent this from ever happening again.'

Unhinged Trump critics such as Anne Applebaum, the writer who smeared as propagandists early proponents of the pandemic lab-leak theory and wasted ink last year imagining parallels between Trump and various 20th-century dictators, kept Washington Post readers' hope alive that they were getting closer to "direct evidence" of collusion, while over at CNN commentators worked as if it there were proof that Russia interfered to get Trump elected.

Photographer: Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Former CNN editor at large Chris Cillizza suggested in a 2018 piece that Trump's refusal to play along with the hoax was a likely sign that Moscow had compromising information on the president. This, for Cillizza, made more sense than the notion "in Trump's mind [that] any talk of Russian interference in the election is an attempt to undermine the 'brilliant campaign' (his words) he ran in 2016 and somehow invalidate his victory."

Days later, CNN's Marshall Cohen identified "10 ways Trump has strayed from his own intelligence agencies on Russian meddling" — a piece that now serves to memorialize the media's misplaced faith in the intelligence community and to vindicate Trump's skepticism.

While the newly released documents from the DNI both salt the remains of the Russian collusion hoax and justify Trump's use of the term "fake news" in reference to numerous publications, the documents could prove far more impactful for those who constructed the false narrative. After all, Gabbard referred the documents to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution.

"These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate," Gabbard wrote.

The director of national intelligence added, "The integrity of our democratic republic demands that every person involved be investigated and brought to justice to prevent this from ever happening again."

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Biden tried defending autopen use to the New York Times. He made it a whole lot worse.

The House Oversight Committee's investigation into former President Joe Biden's cognitive decline while in office, its cover-up, and its alleged exploitation behind the scenes appears to have struck a nerve, drawing Biden out and with him a baseline narrative that might trip up his handlers when they each testify in the weeks to come.

Mike Howell, the president of the Oversight Project — the government watchdog that revealed in early March that Biden's signature on numerous pardons, commutations, executive orders, and other documents of national consequence was machine-generated — told Blaze News, "We were right. Time for some real accountability."

'I made every single one of those.'

On Wednesday, former President Joe Biden's White House doctor, Kevin O'Connor, refused to answer the committee's questions, citing the Fifth Amendment and doctor-patient confidentiality.

The doctor's damning silence prompted Republicans on the committee to conclude that O'Connor "is trying to avoid criminal liability" and that the investigation was indeed dealing with a serious cover-up.

The next day, Biden spoke to the New York Times by phone in an apparent effort to get in front of the autopen scandal even though it left the station months ago. The roughly 10-minute interview didn't do him any favors.

Biden sent mixed signals to the Times about his supposed involvement in the issuance of a record number of pardons and commutations in the final days of his presidency.

Photo by Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images

"I made every single one of those," Biden said regarding the clemency decisions late in his term. "And — including the categories, when we set this up to begin with. And so — but I understand why Trump would think that, because obviously, I guess, he doesn't focus much. Anyway, so — yes, I made every decision."

Despite attributing the clemency decisions to himself, Biden also indicated that his fingerprints might not be on any of them.

In addition to telling the Times that he orally communicated his decisions to aides — a possible tell that there might be a lack of papered evidence showing that he directly approved the last-minute pardons — Biden noted both that the autopen was used liberally because there were "a whole lot of people" and that he did not personally approve every individual categorical clemency.

"Well, first of all, there's categories. So, you know, they aren't reading names off for the commutations for those who had been home confinements for, during the pandemic," said Biden. "So the only things that really we read off names for were, for example, you know, was I, what was I going to do about, for example, Mark Milley?"

"I told them I wanted to make sure he had a pardon because I knew exactly what Trump would do — without any merit, I might add," continued Biden. "And you know, you know, members of the Jan. 6 committee — it's just, there were no — I was deeply involved. I laid out a strategy how I want to go about these, dealing with pardons and commutations. I was — and I pulled the team in to say this is how I want to get it done generically and then specifically. And so, you know, that's just — this is how it worked."

Biden White House emails turned over to investigators by the National Archives and reviewed by the Times cast further doubt on the former president's claim of deep involvement in the pardon process.

'The truth will come out about who was, in fact, running the country.'

The emails indicate that Biden White House staff secretary Stefanie Feldman managed the use of the autopen.

Feldman, the national policy director for Biden's 2020 campaign, took over for Neera Tanden, who told Congress last month that she wielded the power of the autopen until May 2023 but suggested that she was authorized to do so.

According to the emails, Feldman sought written accounts confirming Biden's oral clemency instructions in "key meetings" with staffers. The trouble is that these accounts appear to have been secondhand and in some cases written up several days after the meetings.

Aides to senior Biden advisers who were present for the meetings apparently drafted the accounts confirming Biden's oral instructions. The two advisers named were Biden chief of staff Jeffrey Zients and then-White House counsel Ed Siskel.

Senior Democrats told Politico last year that Siskel organized talks among Biden aides in the former president's absence on "whether to issue pre-emptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House."

Lists of meeting participants indicate that the aides who drafted the accounts of Biden's supposed clemency instructions were not themselves present when the instructions were given.

Rather, the emails reportedly imply that the aides simply wrote up whatever their bosses relayed to them, then circulated the drafts to Siskel, Zients, and other meeting participants before sending along the final versions to the master of the autopen.

In order of appearance: Ron Klain, Bruce Reed, Steve Ricchetti, and Anita Dunn. Photo (left): Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images; Photo (right) Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images

As for the high-profile clemency decisions that came just before Biden left office, the final decision appears to have come from Zients.

Emails suggest that on Jan. 18 and Jan. 19, Biden had two meetings, the first with Zients, Siskel, and Bruce Reed — Axios indicated that Reed was sometimes referred to in the Biden White House as one of "the pooh-bahs" — and the second with Siskel, Reed, Anthony Bernal, Steve Ricchetti, and Annie Tomasini, all of whom are on congressional investigators' radar.

Bernal served as senior adviser to former first lady Jill Biden and was characterized as one of the most influential people in the White House and a key member of Biden's so-called politburo in Jake Tapper's and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson's new book, "Original Sin."

Ricchetti, former counselor to Biden, was among the names Department of Justice pardon attorney Ed Martin mentioned when announcing his investigation into the questionable "autopen" pardons issued in the final days of the Biden White House.

Tomasini was Biden's deputy chief of staff, who congressional investigators suspect may have been "involved in running interference on behalf of the former President and perhaps performing duties exclusively reserved for the President of the United States."

Biden supposedly kept his staffers until 10 p.m. at the Jan. 19 meeting where the pre-emptive pardons for Biden's family members were discussed. Three minutes after the meeting, Siskel sent a draft summary of the former president's alleged decision to Zients' assistant, who then forwarded it to Reed and Zients for approval. A final version went to Feldman minutes later, chased by a message from Zients apparently stating, "I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons."

When asked about evidence that Biden did not authorize the clemency actions, Trump White House spokesman Harrison Fields told the Times Sunday that Biden "should not be trusted" and that "the truth will come out about who was, in fact, running the country."

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'Shut it down': Newly released FBI doc reveals who apparently killed probes into Clinton Foundation

Background

The 2017 FBI memo

Additional insights

Dem whistleblower went to FBI about Schiff's alleged 'treasonous' role in Russia hoax — but DOJ ignored him: Report

Trump's CIA director has bad news for Hillary Clinton regarding alleged 'treasonous conspiracy'

Quick recap

Clinton might take another tumble

John Brennan’s 5 Lies That Set Russiagate In Motion

Over target: Panicked liberal media attacks Gabbard's 'treasonous conspiracy' claim

Refresher

Liberal media turns on another gaslight

There Was No Peaceful Transfer Of Power In 2017

Report: Russia Hoax Was Built On ‘One Scant, Unclear, And Unverifiable Fragment Of A Sentence’

Obama and Brennan set to reap the whirlwind: Gabbard refers evidence of 'years-long coup' to DOJ for criminal probe

From Obama to CNN: How the liberal media helped facilitate the 'treasonous conspiracy' about Russian collusion

Biden tried defending autopen use to the New York Times. He made it a whole lot worse.

The decline of customer service — and why it matters

Accountability is the best way to honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy

Man admits to raping girl thousands of times and impregnating her — he has agreed to unbelievable plea deal

Alex Jones’ daring infiltration of Bohemian Grove unmasks elitist pagan rituals and occult secrets

Qatar’s Double-Sided Diplomacy Crumbles in Israeli Airstrike

California may defy Trump with new statewide EV credits

VIDEO: Erika Kirk makes first public remarks since the death of her husband, Charlie Kirk

He May Have Pulled The Trigger, But Charlie Kirk’s Suspected Killer Didn’t ‘Act Alone’

Background

The 2017 FBI memo

Additional insights

Quick recap

Clinton might take another tumble

Refresher

Liberal media turns on another gaslight

We’ll keep you informed with top stories for conservatives who want to become informed decision makers.