‘Judicial Watch FOIA litigation is the best hope for getting full accountability on this attack on our constitutional republic…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) With the Mueller Report‘s debunked allegations of Russian collusion behind us, conservatives increasingly have sounded a drumbeat to hold accountable those responsible enough for the real misinformation campaign.
Once again, Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests from the transparency/accountability guardians at Judicial Watch may be the catalyst that helps set it in motion.
The salacious and since-discredited Steele Dossier lies at the center of a massive web of collusion, which likely enmeshed the Hillary Clinton campaign, intelligence community, White House, media outlets and the opposition research firm FusionGPS in a plot that itself may have been orchestrated by the Kremlin.
And yet, all were willing participants due to the partisan, anti-Trump elements who were willing to cash in all ethical scruples in service of a higher mission: undermining the GOP president while deflecting from Clinton’s potentially criminal conduct.
Judicial Watch announced a FOIA lawsuit on Wednesday seeking records of communication between the liberal CNN network and two Obama-era intelligence officials: former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan.
The two men, both of whom later became CNN analysts, are believed to have had a hand in leaking Steele Dossier to the network, it said in a press release.
“Judicial Watch is again in court trying to get the truth about the Obama gang illegal leaks and conspiracy targeting President Trump,” said its president, Tom Fitton.
The organization’s previous FOIA lawsuits on Clinton’s role in covering up the 2012 embassy attacks in Benghazi, Libya—just prior to President Barack Obama’s re-election—uncovered perhaps an even greater conspiracy with the revelation in early 2015 that Clinton had maintained a private email server to dodge transparency laws.
The hunt for the missing emails triggered a cursory FBI investigation that turned up little before being dismissed with no charges, but it also led Russian-backed agents to hack the servers of the Clinton campaign and DNC, where the published emails revealed a number of shady dealings.
To deflect, Clinton sought help from the FBI and other intelligence bureaus in disseminating to the press a phony narrative that Trump was working with the Russians. Some, such as FBI Director James Comey, may have seen an ongoing investigation as the leverage needed to hold their position in the new administration.
Others, like Clapper and Brennan, may have had more subversive, partisan motives.
“Clapper and Brennan were key proponents of the big lie, exposed by the Mueller report, that President Trump colluded with the Russians,” Fitton said. “Judicial Watch FOIA litigation is the best hope for getting full accountability on this attack on our constitutional republic.”
Brennan, whose attacks on Trump resulted last year in the revocation of his security clearance, is known to have lied previously to Congress about the collateral damage involved in drone warfare.
Although he claimed that the dossier had little bearing on investigations into Trump, subsequent reporting undercut his denials. Following the release of Mueller’s conclusions, he issued a mea culpa, declaring he must have been the recipient of bad intelligence.
Reporting by the National Review in June 2018 revealed that not only was he a conduit for spreading the fake news to the media, but he also likely urged others to use it in their intelligence assessments, even while knowing that it had originated with the Clinton campaign.
According to the National Review‘s Victor Davis Hanson, Brennan “almost certainly did not tell the truth to Congress when he testified in answer to Rep. Trey Gowdy’s questions that he neither knew who had commissioned the Steele dossier nor had the CIA relied on its contents for any action.”
During a lecture sponsored by Queens University, in Charlotte, NC, on Tuesday, Comey also hinted at the deeper motives of the intelligence heads when he recounted a story about an intelligence briefing with President Barack Obama shortly before the dossier rumors hit the press.
He said the discussion—at which Brennan was also present—included deliberations on whether to notify the new president–elect about the sexual innuendo contained in the dossier. Ultimately, Comey said, they decided to do so because “one of the ways you undermine an adversary is to tell them you know all about it.”