Hillary Clinton approved a plan hatched by a campaign adviser to “smear” then-candidate Donald Trump with false claims of Russian collusion and distract from her own mounting email scandal during the 2016 election, according to explosive intelligence files declassified Thursday.
The plan included “raising the theme of ‘Putin’s support for Trump’” and “subsequently steering public opinion toward the notion that it needs to equate” the Russian leader’s political influence campaign with actual interference in election infrastructure.
“Clinton approved a plan proposed by one of her foreign policy advisors, Julianne Smith, to ‘smear Donald Trump by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican candidate,’” one of the declassified memos read.
Special counsel John Durham uncovered the information during a multi-year probe into intelligence activities during the 2016 election.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and other members of the US intelligence community declassified the files from Durham’s probe at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
“Based on the Durham annex, the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means,” Grassley said in a statement.
“These intelligence reports and related records, whether true or false, were buried for years. History will show that the Obama and Biden administration’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump,” he added.
“This political weaponization has caused critical damage to our institutions and is one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history. The new Trump administration has a tremendous responsibility to the American people to fix the damage done and do so with maximum speed and transparency.”
The Post reached out to reps for Clinton and Smith for comment.
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Bombshell new dossier from FBI’s ‘burn bags’ claims Hillary Clinton and Obama approved Russian smear campaign to take down Trump
The Obama administration and the Clinton campaign were aware of – and potentially coordinated – a plan to falsely tie Donald Trump to Russia
Congress released a previously classified intelligence report claiming that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign likely ‘ginned up’ the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy and wanted the FBI’s help.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, under Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released a 29-page classified file from former Special Counsel John Durham’s ‘Russiagate’ investigation on Thursday.
The heart of the explosive allegation: That the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign were aware of – and potentially coordinated – a plan to falsely tie Donald Trump to Russia, a chief U.S. rival.
A March 2016 memorandum stated that in part ‘Clinton staff, with support from special services, is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and the ‘Russian mafia.”
Within the pages of the annex are private communications between Clinton staff and workers at a George Soros nonprofit discussing a plan to tie Trump to Russia to distract from scrutiny over the Hillary email server scandal, which was hurting the Democrat’s campaign at the time.
Leonard Benardo, Senior Vice President of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, sent emails to top Clinton staffers that showed Hillary Clinton herself approved of the Trump-Russia plan.
That plan included the FBI working on behalf of Clinton, according to Benardo’s emails.
‘Julie [Clinton Campaign Advisor] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump,’ one of his emails disclosed in the Durham annex states. ‘Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.’
Durham later wrote that Julianne Smith, a Clinton campaign advisor, ‘was, at minimum, playing a role in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to tie Trump to Russia.’
The emails ‘certainly lends at least some credence that such a plan existed,’ Durham said.
The annex authored by the special counsel, released publicly for the first time today, shows Clinton’s efforts to tie Trump and Russia together and the FBI’s failure to investigate Clinton’s ties to the Russia collusion allegations, like the infamously debunked Steele Dossier.
‘Based on the Durham annex, the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means,’ Grassley, 91, said in a statement.
‘History will show that the Obama and Biden administration’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump,’ the senator continued. ‘This political weaponization has caused critical damage to our institutions and is one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history.
According to sources, the annex was among files stuffed in ‘burn bags’ that were due to be destroyed before recently being rescued by FBI employees. A person familiar with the discovery speculated to the Daily Mail that it was likely an oversight by previous directors that prevented the documents from being destroyed.
The person added that it’s likely the documents would have never seen the light of day if the FBI wasn’t diligently looking through everything it comes across at the bureau.
Donald Trump’s CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently suggested that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top Obama aides could be hit with perjury charges over the annex.
A spokesperson for Clinton did not immediately respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Obamas did not immediately respond to a request for comment either.
Ratcliffe said that Obama officials involved with the ‘Russia hoax’ – the debunked narrative that Russia interfered with the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump’s campaign – could be prosecuted.
The dossier, a 2016 opposition research file crafted by former MI6 spy Christoper Steele against then-candidate Trump, was a central – and largely debunked – component of the FBI’s ‘Russiagate’ investigation.
Ratcliffe has also noted that former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan could still be hit with charges, including lying to Congress.
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Peter Schweizer: Book Claims Oklahoma City Bombing Was ‘Manufactured Terror’ with Deep FBI Involvement
“The Oklahoma City attack was not a lone wolf operation,” she tells the hosts. “It was manufactured terror — a sting operation that went sideways.”
Was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing really an FBI deep-cover operation that went wrong? That is the conclusion of a new book by an author who has studied the worst incident of domestic terrorism in America’s history for more than 20 years.
Margaret Roberts, author of the new book Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing, was previously news director for the hit TV show, America’s Most Wanted. An award-winning investigative journalist, she is the only reporter who got a face-to-face interview with co-conspirator Terry Nichols, who is serving a life sentence in a Colorado federal prison. His co-conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, was executed in 2001 for his crimes, yet questions have lingered since the 1995 bombing that the FBI knew more than it was telling about the plot.
Roberts’s book is well-timed, with the FBI under the microscope for its role in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, as well as the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, and Roberts joins The Drill Down to discuss with hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers what she learned.
With efforts by new Attorney General Pamela Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel to release previously classified documents on a variety of FBI-related mysteries, Roberts hopes they will expose the government’s real role in the most devastating domestic terrorism incident on American soil.
“The Oklahoma City attack was not a lone wolf operation,” she tells the hosts. “It was manufactured terror — a sting operation that went sideways.”
On April 19, 1995, a massive bomb exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City, slaughtering 168 people including 15 children in the building’s daycare center. Almost immediately, a massive federal manhunt focused on Timothy McVeigh.
Roberts’s research has produced evidence of a neo-Nazi plot by a white supremacist group called the Aryan Republican Army, in which the FBI played a hidden role. To conceal its counter-terrorism operations, the FBI allowed suspects, whom she names, to walk free, thus denying justice to the victims and hiding the truth.
“I had been the news director of America’s Most Wanted, worked hand in glove with the FBI for three years on the highest profile manhunt stories,” she tells the hosts. “And this story, before it took a big U-turn, was a manhunt story because 24 eyewitnesses on the ground in Oklahoma City on April 19 saw not just Timothy McVeigh in the Ryder truck, but a never-identified accomplice who rode next to him and was known only as John Doe #2, who exited the truck with Timothy McVeigh and vanished into thin air… Timothy McVeigh had an accomplice in the bomb truck.”
“It’s a shocking claim,” says Eric Eggers.
Roberts followed a trail laid by “an attorney named Jesse Trentedue, who pressed landmark Freedom of Information Act litigation to force pieces of the untold story into the public view.” Trentadue sued the FBI over the documents, and his star witness, a top FBI deep-cover agent named John Matthews was scheduled to testify but backed out under pressure from the bureau.
She learned of an FBI program known as “Patriot Conspiracy” or PATCON. As part of that program, Matthews infiltrated 22 extremist groups that could be capable of acts of domestic terrorism. Many intelligence and law enforcement people have long warned, though, that the problem with this law enforcement tactic is knowing where the surveillance ends and entrapment and incitement begin.
Matthews left that FBI program because he became disillusioned by what it was doing, Roberts says. “As he said to me, ‘it was set up to incite violence and I signed on to stop the violence.’”
Matthews told her that he believed that the bombing was a PATCON operation that did not intend for the bomb to go off. “It was intended to catch the terrorists,” she says.
“But his bombshell revelation, which he said he knew directly, was that the FBI had set up the Aryan Republican Army terror group as a front group to incite violence,” she says.
“So instead of preventing violence, were they accelerating it?” asks Schweizer.
“Nichols told me that his agenda was revenge. But he mentioned a man named Roger Moore as a third conspirator who he believes was a government provocateur,” and that it was Moore who provided the explosives.” Moore, retired in Florida, denied the claim in 2005.
Yet, all this is not a history book, because some of the same FBI tactics have been speculated to have been at work in other (foiled) incidents like the Boston Marathon bombing, and particularly in the attempt on the life of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “There seemed to be a lot of undercover operators in that case,” she notes.
Nichols even told her that McVeigh had once “slipped” in conversation with him and said that he was himself acting as a government asset. That, she says, was echoed by a fellow death-row prisoner who told her the same thing, as well as by McVeigh’s first public defenders, assigned to him right after his arrest.
Schweizer points out that government agencies develop incentives to increase their funding by making a problem seem worse. He wonders if that happened in the Oklahoma City case. “We know some of these groups exist, but government agencies get budgets based on the demand for their services. You don’t get a bigger budget by downplaying threats; I think it would help the FBI to be transparent.”
“My book is the origin story for how we got to where we are. Everyone wants transparency and we know we don’t have it,” she says. “Something important to consider is the cost of the concealment,” she says, in terms of public trust. “The FBI collected surveillance videotape of the delivery of that bomb, of the two men getting out of the truck. If we had been, but the FBI never allowed the American public to see those images, which would answer so many questions.”
What would she like to see the federal government do to bring greater transparency?
Matthews’s sealed deposition has never been made public, after he withdrew under FBI pressure from testifying in Trentadue’s lawsuit. “[Atty. Gen. Pamela] Bondi has a letter from Trentadue asking for the Department of Justice to stand down and release that deposition. She also believes the archival video footage showing who got out of that truck in front of the Murrah building should be released. Finally, she thinks the Senate Judiciary Committee should hold hearings on the entire PATCON effort, modeling on the 1975 Church Committee hearings.
Blowback is now available online and in stores.
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