(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) The FBI has placed one of the central figures who concocted the Russiagate hoax on administrative leave—signaling what appears to be a long-overdue purge of officials who undermined President Donald Trump in his first term.
The official, Brian Auten, was among the agents peddling the Russia collusion hoax during the 2016 presidential election. Equally damning, he worked on the FBI’s investigation of the Hunter Biden laptop—a probe that whistleblowers said did not receive proper scrutiny, likely in a bid to protect former President Joe Biden.
Auten’s suspension, reported first on Friday by the liberal New York Times, comes as no surprise.
During his FBI tenure, Auten would quickly rise to become the FBI’s top Russian analyst. In 2016 and 2017, he infamously cleared the Steele dossier— a collection of salacious allegations created for Hillary Clinton’s campaign which sought to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin. The dossier became the central piece of evidence used by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Auten also never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about the FBI’s longstanding concerns about FBI informant Igor Danchenko, who helped Christopher Steele compile his bogus dossier.
Auten was later suspended 30 days for that fiasco.
In Government Gangsters, Patel documents how more than 50 “corrupt actors” within the deep state actively worked to undermine Trump’s election and subsequent administration after 2016.
“Yet just like his superiors, Auten has faced no real accountability in light of these findings,” Patel wrote, as quoted by The Times. “The fact that Auten was not fired from the F.B.I. and prosecuted for his part in the Russia Gate conspiracy is a national embarrassment.”
According to Patel, the FBI attempted to “hide and spin” the “Biden family corruption” revealed by the laptop.
For instance, communications within the laptop indicated that at least 10 percent of the payments received by Hunter during the Obama-Biden administration were earmarked for someone known as the “Big Guy.”
Devon Archer, a former business associate of Hunter, testified before Congress that the “Big Guy” was none other than Biden.
Biden would ultimately run for president in 2020, and later moved to pardon his son and siblings for their roles in influence-peddling schemes exposed by congressional investigators.
