(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has released previously hidden documents, which expose how the Obama administration pressured the FBI to downplay then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email scandal ahead of the 2016 election. The new documents also detail the shocking extent to which the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign ginned up phony intelligence about Donald Trump’s links to Russia.
What comes next is unclear.
Thursday’s new Russiagate revelations come from the long-hidden annex to John Durham’s 2023 Special Counsel report. The annex was purportedly found inside “burn bags” hidden in a secret FBI room.
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According to the annex, an FBI informer identified as “TI” provided the bureau in 2016 with two intelligence reports, which described “confidential conversations” between then-Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and two people at the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundation: Leonard Bernardo and Jeffrey Goldstein.
The report said that then-President Barack Obama didn’t want Hillary’s scandal to taint his legacy. Accordingly, “To solve the problem, the President puts pressure on FBI Director James Comey through Attorney General Lynch, however, so far without concrete results.” The same report also said that Comey favored Republicans, and that the FBI didn’t have any evidence against Clinton—because she deleted her emails.
While the FBI informant’s intelligence wasn’t corroborated at the time, the FBI indeed closed its investigation into Clinton without recommending charges.
The Durham annex also included information about how the Clinton campaign ginned up the Russiagate hoax, with the goal to get the FBI to investigate Trump instead of her. In fact, Open Society Foundation official Bernardo predicted the FBI would do exactly that.
“It will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire,” Benardo purportedly wrote in July 2016—predicting exactly what the FBI would do.
Grassley touted his findings in a Thursday press release.
“History will show that the Obama and Biden administration’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump,” he said.
But what comes next is unclear. The disclosures follow reports that FBI Director Kash Patel is running an investigation into whether there was a “grand conspiracy” between intelligence officials and Democratic politicians.
Trump has indicated that Obama won’t be charged because he was operating under presidential immunity, but that other officials could still be open to criminal liability.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.