Under Trump, the CIA is still covering up its Russiagate fraud

A new CIA review faults top Obama intelligence officials for "procedural anomalies", while ignoring the core deceit in their allegations of "Russian interference."

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Since his first term in the White House, President Donald Trump has promised accountability for Russiagate, the manufactured controversy in which the Hillary Clinton campaign and national security officials framed Trump and his associates as conspirators with Moscow.

Despite investigations in all branches of government, Trump has yet to deliver. The most thorough probe, launched in Trump’s first term by Special Counsel John Durham and concluding in 2023, faulted the FBI for relying on the Clinton-funded collection of conspiracy fiction known as the “Steele dossier” and other compromised material in a baseless hunt for Trump-Russia collusion. Yet Durham only brought two cases to trial against relatively minor actors, both of which ended in acquittals. Instead of wielding his subpoena power, Durham let many of Russiagate’s main principals ignore his requests for an interview. And while he exposed new malfeasance behind the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, Durham left unscathed the companion, equally dubious allegation that Russia waged a “sweeping and systematic” campaign, as Robert Mueller and a legion of credulous media outlets put it, to sway the 2016 campaign in Trump’s favor.

Durham’s timidity on that latter front was especially derelict given the fact that his office obtained evidence that freshly exposed “Russian interference” as yet another Clinton campaign-generated deceit, as I reported in June 2023. Along with every other investigation and establishment media outlet, Durham also ignored the admission under oath that CrowdStrike – another Clinton campaign contractor relied on by the FBI, and the source for the foundational allegation that Russia stole Democratic Party emails and gave them to Wikileaks to help Trump -- in fact “did not have concrete evidence” of Russian hacking.

A new review ordered by Trump’s CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, follows in the tepid, half-baked record of Russiagate accountability to date.