Tipsheet

The Key Detail That's Found in Every Investigation About Trump or the 2016 Election

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  May 16, 2023 6:35 AM

The Durham Report is here, and many intelligence and law enforcement officials should prepare to be yanked before numerous House committees to answer for the Russian collusion hoax. It’s official: Trump was right. Half the country knew for years that this was a wild goose chase, super-charged by the Justice Department’s overt bias against Donald Trump. CNN’s Jake Tapper didn’t sugarcoat it: the findings of Special Counsel John Durham are devastating to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and it exonerates the former president. The actions the bureau and others performed constitute the ‘deep state’ operations against the former president that we all knew were true. The FBI slow-walked the Clinton email probe but executed a headlong charge in the one targeting Mr. Trump, which hoped to peg him as a Kremlin agent.


In the process, the credibility of the FBI, our preeminent law enforcement and domestic intelligence agency that prided itself as an objective, professional, and apolitical institution, has been wrecked. The history of abuse and overreach throughout this investigation is epic, with new details showing that the FBI had evidence that the Steele Dossier could be Russian disinformation, which it was, but withheld disclosing that to keep the spy warrants against those in Trump’s orbit operational. Bias being a motivation, which Durham highlighted, isn’t new. In fact, the basis for the core of the report was already previewed to us with the Horowitz report in 2018. 

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz exposed the heart of what was driving the FBI during the 2016 election, specifically about the Clinton email probe, albeit in elliptical language; lord knows how many lawyers overlooked his report. At the time, the issue of bias was front and center since disgraced former FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, Lisa Page, an FBI attorney, was exposed for not having just an extramarital tryst but tens of thousands of text messages, virtually all of them anti-Trump. Strzok was a top counterintelligence agent for the FBI; he signed off on the spy operation against the Trump campaign—Crossfire Hurricane—and was only removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team when the relationship was revealed. He was demoted to the human resources department of the FBI before he was fired. 

At the time, the media zeroed in on Horowitz, saying that there was no evidence of bias that determined the course of the investigations during the 2016 election. Translation: The FBI did its job; there’s nothing to see here. It was Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel who dissected the semi-legalese embedded within Horowitz’s findings:

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In case we need a refresher, Mr. Paul Combetta is the person who deleted the Clinton emails that were under subpoena. Strassel added:

 …the bias is everywhere. It’s in the texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and those of three other employees who are routinely “hostile” to Candidate Trump…It’s in a message from an unnamed agent in November 2016 who writes that although the FBI found Clinton aide Huma Abedin had “lied,” it doesn’t matter since “no one at DOJ is going to prosecute.” To which a second agent replies. “Rog—noone is going to pros[ecute] even if we find unique classified.” 

It’s in the Justice Department’s decision to cut deals with Mrs. Clinton and her staff and shelter them from a grand jury. And to agree to limitations in searching for and in devices. And in immunity agreements. 

Snippets and previews of the Durham report’s conclusions were littered all over throughout the Trump years. It’s now just compiled into one damning conclusion that threads all the FBI’s biases, incompetence, corruption, and malfeasance into one condensed account. This should lead to more subpoenas from House Republicans being issued to the principal actors in this production, and the inquiries shouldn't stop until someone goes to jail.

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Last Note: Sorry, make that two reports that gave us a preview because the Meuller investigation also concluded that there was no solid evidence of Russian collusion.