Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been fond of calling President Donald Trump a “puppet.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet to be exact.
It’s a conspiracy theory the Democrats and the media have been pushing since 2016: Trump is being controlled by the former Soviet state.
But new reports show that it was Hillary — not Trump — who Putin and the Russians favored in the 2016 election.
Former CIA analyst and House Intelligence Committee member Fred Fleitz detailed the revelations in a newly released bombshell report about the origins of the Russia investigation.
Fleitz claimed he had been told by the House Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairmen Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., information was hidden that suggested Putin believed he stood more to gain if Hillary were to become president
House Intelligence Committee staff told me that after an exhaustive investigation reviewing intelligence and interviewing intelligence officers, they found that [former CIA Director John] Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election.
The Horn News mentioned Tuesday that Brennan was under increased scrutiny for his alleged role in leading the Deep State Russia hoax, after the growing belief that he pushed the Steele dossier knowing the report was half-baked.
And now “the most politicized intelligence chief in American history” is being accused of hiding crucial information that could have connected Putin and Hillary –– and therefore would have ruined the mainstream narrative that Trump was striking shady deals with Russian gangsters inside Trump Tower.
And that’s only the beginning.
The media has spent years hyping a salacious dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which supposedly laid out the basis for now-disproven allegations of collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
But newly declassified FBI notes reveal previously hidden links between Russia and Steele himself, whose dossier was built on behalf of Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign.
In 2017, the FBI received evidence “indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting,” according to one of those footnotes.
Steele himself, the notes state, had “frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs.”
The footnotes specifically focus on claims in the dossier over then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who later turned on the president and was convicted on tax and campaign finance violations.
That part of the report, the FBI was told, “was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”
The Wall Street Journal was more blunt in how it described the situation: “the FBI was duped by Russian intelligence.”
The paper’s editorial board ripped into the agency, saying that while Russia did interfere in the 2016 election, it had help from the inside… from the FBI itself.
“The FBI should have been wary of Mr. Steele’s reporting, having been warned he was connected to the rival campaign,” the newspaper wrote. Instead, they said, “another footnote showed the FBI closed its eyes to Mr. Steele’s ‘frequent contacts’ with Russian oligarchs.”
The dossier, as many have observed, never should have been used for investigative purposes in the first place.
It wasn’t an intelligence report compiled by impartial agencies. It wasn’t a report at all.
As the Journal notes, it was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary campaign – making it highly partisan material with a specific and direct political agenda. Even Steele himself threw cold water over his own dossier, reportedly telling Fusion GPS — the company that commissioned it – that it was about “70 percent” accurate.
That alone should’ve given investigators pause.
Instead, the feds used it as a tool to try to take down Trump, as the new footnotes confirm.
Republican senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who were instrumental in getting the footnotes declassified, slammed the sloppy investigation in a joint news release.
“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation,” they said in the joint statement. “These footnotes confirm that there was a direct Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and there were ties between Russian intelligence and a presidential campaign – the Clinton campaign, not Trump’s.”
These footnotes might be only the beginning of a new phase of revelations that will blow open not only the dossier and its origins, but the flawed and politically charged investigations that followed.
There are at least three major events to come in the not-too-distant future.
First, Grassley and Johnson say more declassified notes will soon be released to the public, giving the public even more insight into the FBI investigation.
Second, when the Senate returns from its hiatus, it will launch a new investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, in addition to an ongoing investigation into the abuse of FISA warrants to investigate those close to the 2016 Trump campaign.
Many of those FISA warrants, we know from previous investigations, were spurred by the Steele dossier… which we now know had Russian involvement.
And third, there’s still another major investigation underway. U.S. Attorney John Durham has been probing the origins of the FBI’s decisions – and the word around Washington is that not only will his report be ready soon, but that it’ll name names and pull no punches.
The Horn editorial team