The intelligence community’s dirty laundry will be aired this week by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag. The same crew exposed the public opinion influencing operation between Twitter and the FBI. Yesterday, they exposed how the CIA worked with the top intelligence agencies of our allies to spy on Trump associates long before the FBI signed off on their official counterintelligence probe in the summer of 2016. The CIA pegged 26 Trump associates to be surveilled illegally–all conducted to take down Trump. And now, there’s this binder cataloging these felonious intelligence operations that’s now in the open. It disappeared during the Trump presidency, but it’s also fitting that CNN left the first breadcrumb, written by the IC’s favorite scribe—Natasha Bertrand—who just got a promotion.
The trio details Trump’s fight with the IC, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Department of Justice to declassify the Russigate documents. Trump’s CIA director, Gina Haspel, has been hell on wheels in blocking its disclosure, possibly because, as London bureau chief, she was one of the signatories that green-lit the Russian collusion investigation when the FBI asked her. The reasons for refusing to disclose these documents are the usual: people will die if declassified. No, it just exposed the IC’s rogue operations against the political rival of the then-sitting president. It went missing in 2021. The binder was compiled by House investigators under the watchful eye of the CIA in 2019-2020, though at some point—someone was able to get it out of Langley (via Public):
Report: Deep state is scrambling to find a missing top-secret binder that shows how Obama's CIA set up the Russia hoax @shellenberger @mtaibbi pic.twitter.com/oBvKRrqkkp
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) February 14, 2024
Last December 15th, as Americans decorated trees, lit Menorahs, and prepared to tune out for winter holidays, CNN ran an extraordinary article titled, “The mystery of the missing binder: How a collection of raw Russian intelligence disappeared under Trump.”
Co-authored by Natasha Bertrand, the gargantuan expose claimed a mysterious “binder” of “highly classified information related to Russian election interference” went “missing” in the chaotic waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency in January 2021, raising concerns that some of America’s most “closely guarded national security secrets… could be exposed.”
CNN and its intelligence sources meant “exposure” in a bad way. Sources have told Public and Racket, however, that the secrets officials worry might be “exposed” are ones that would implicate them in widespread abuses of intelligence authority dating back to the 2015-2016 election season.
[…]
Dating back to the release of the so-called “Nunes memo” in 2018 exposing the corruption of the FISA application process, senior intelligence officials, including Trump’s CIA Director, Gina Haspel, have repeatedly blocked attempts to declassify information about the Trump-Russia investigation.
They had good reason to obstruct the release of these documents.
As Public and Racket reported yesterday, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had foreign intelligence agencies run an illegal spy operation against then-candidate Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. This illegally acquired intelligence was used to justify the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official probe, “Crossfire Hurricane,” which in turn spurred the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The documents in question are said to contain information about the legal justification for those investigations, or more specifically, the lack of justification, among other things. Should more of that information be made public, it might implicate a long list of officials in serious abuses.
[…]
CNN reported that “the binder’s contents included the FBI’s problematic foreign intelligence surveillance warrants on a Trump campaign adviser from 2017; interview notes with Christopher Steele, author of the infamous dossier on Trump and Russia; FBI reports from a confidential human source related to the Russia investigation; and internal FBI and DOJ text messages and emails, among other documents.”
House Intelligence investigators created the binder in 2019 and 2020 while working out of CIA headquarters in Langley. The binder consisted of raw intelligence logs and communications from the CIA and the National Security Council (NSC). The CIA “monitored” investigators, and the investigation had to be done “at their spaces,” said a source.
Investigators wanted to declassify their findings before Trump left office, but the CIA “would not cooperate.” Investigators, a source told Public and Racket, “created a binder that blew up the assessment but couldn’t get it out because the CIA controlled it.”
[…]
Trump’s plan to declassify Russiagate documents appears to have been thwarted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The White House created multiple redacted copies with plans to share them with journalists and Republicans in Congress, CNN reported.
There are people in the replies suggesting that "we already knew this."
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) February 13, 2024
No, we didn't. And no, you didn't. Only a tiny number of people knew about this until now.
And, as we note in our story, "If the top-secret documents exist proving these charges, they are potentially…
Excellent work. Of course we all knew our own government spied on Trump; but this is the first time I've seen proof they colluded with foreign intel agencies to take down an American citizen.
— Tami Marler (@tamimarlerMBA) February 13, 2024
So, you can see why there’s a mad scramble to find the files that point to Obama’s CIA setting up the Russian collusion hoax.
This binder also reportedly contains incriminating material concerning how the IC’s drafted their assessment that Vladimir Putin tried to influence the 2016 election. Not that you didn’t already know, but it was also a con job: then-CIA Director John Brennan personally selected the spooks used to analyze the “cooked intelligence,” which further fanned the flames of this narrative, whose basis was an illegal intelligence operation.
