On December 9, 2019, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported that FBI officials had perpetrated a massive fraud on a federal surveillance court when they applied for a warrant and three renewals to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The report was proof that a cabal of rogue agents in the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign, its transition team, and the presidency. For us at the Hannity team, it was proof of something else as well: that we had been right every step of the way.
Democrats and the media mob for three years had peddled lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. They started in the fall of 2016, with claims that Carter Page was working with the Kremlin to influence the election.1 By January 2017 they had made public Christopher Steele’s infamous dirty dossier, with its wild claims that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was at the heart of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin, and that the Trump team had promised foreign policy changes if the Russians helped Trump win the 2016 election. It even claimed the Russians had compromising information on Trump, showing him with hookers in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow.2
The accusations grew wilder with each day. The left accused Trump of working with Russia to spread misinformation. They claimed to have proof that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen snuck into Prague to discuss paying hush money to Russian hackers.3 They claimed Trump Tower hosted a shady server that connected to Russia’s Alfa Bank.4 Donald Trump Jr. was supposedly in on the Russia plot. So were Attorney General Jeff Sessions, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, half of Congress, and even the National Rifle Association. Every day it was “Russia, Russia, Russia.”
This crazed narrative inflicted terrible harm on both the country and specific individuals. The FBI’s investigation destroyed the reputations of patriotic American citizens like Flynn and Page. It inspired the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, who reigned as a dark shadow over 675 days of the Trump administration, tyrannizing Washington with a flood of subpoenas and witness demands. Mueller never found any Trump-Russia “collusion,” but he jailed more than a half dozen people for unrelated crimes. A corrupt media establishment abandoned its most basic duties to truth and fairness, even as the liberal elite abandoned that most core American concept: innocent until proven guilty.
Yet it was all a giant hoax—one unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our lives. It was brought to you by the very same people who rejected the 2016 election results. They hated that Donald Trump won that election fair and square, and were willing to spin any fantasy to take him out. And they stick to that fantasy even after four separate investigations have proven them wrong. The FBI found no evidence of Russian collusion. Neither did a House Intelligence Committee probe run by California’s Devin Nunes. Nor has a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. Mueller, too, struck out.
Even as the mob peddled their lies, an all-star cast on my radio and TV shows was providing Americans the real story. Mark Levin, Dan Bongino, Sara Carter, John Solomon, Gregg Jarrett, Alan Dershowitz, David Limbaugh, Joe diGenova, Victoria Toensing, and many other standouts joined us to document how a corrupt upper echelon of law enforcement and intelligence officials abused their powers to spy on a campaign and presidency they didn’t like. They relied on phony intel, listened in on conversations, used undercover informants, and leaked bogus claims. We the people gave them powerful intelligence tools to protect us, and they turned that weaponry back on the man whom Americans duly elected to office. The Fake News Media trashed our Hannity ensemble cast every day for reporting these truths. But we never relented. We covered this very real abuse of power, and the 434-page Horowitz report was vindication. We were dead-on right.
We were right, for instance, that the FBI had launched a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016 on the thinnest of suspicions. Forget all the crazy later conspiracy claims. According to the IG report, the FBI started with one paltry piece of information: a tip from Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat then based in the United Kingdom.5 For some unknown reason, Downer arranged to have a drink in May 2016 with a lower-level Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos. Downer later claimed Papadopoulos told him the Russians intended to release information that would hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Papadopoulos later testified that he didn’t even remember saying that to Downer. But suppose he did. So what? A lot of people at the time were talking about the secret server Clinton kept as secretary of state and whether it had been hacked by foreign governments. What we have here is our crack FBI admitting it launched a full-fledged probe on the basis of worldwide gossip.
Making this story even more mysterious is that Papadopoulos remembers a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud telling him in April 2016—right before he met with Downer—that the Russians had Clinton emails. In his report, Mueller claimed Mifsud had “connections to Russia,” to make it sound as if the FBI had good reason to investigate all this.6 (Notably, Mueller stopped short of FBI director James Comey’s characterization of Mifsud as a “Russian agent”7 or House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s description of him as a “Russian cut-out.”)8 But reports show Mifsud is actually connected to all kinds of Western intelligence agencies, making him an unlikely Russian asset. The bottom line is that the FBI’s claim that it had good reason for starting a full-fledged counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign doesn’t wash.
We were also right that the FBI used the dirty dossier in their investigation. For nearly a year, Democrats and the media described the dossier as a series of high-value “intelligence reports,” passing off its author, Christopher Steele, as a “well-placed Western intelligence source,”9 a “Russia expert,”10 and “a veteran spy” for Britain’s MI6 who “spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters.”11 NBC News actually ran this headline: “Christopher Steele, Trump Dossier Author, Is a Real-Life James Bond.”12 Comey would later insist Steele was “a credible source, someone with a track record, someone who was a credible and respected member of an allied intelligence service during his career.”13
America learned the ugly truth in October 2017, thanks to the Nunes investigation in the House Intelligence Committee. We reported on it, and the Horowitz report confirmed it. The dossier wasn’t the work of a well-meaning intel professional. It was a political dirty trick, a hit job paid for by the Clinton campaign and fed to the FBI to sabotage Trump.14 It was the source of all those claims that Page and Manafort were at the heart of a Trump-Russia “conspiracy.”
The dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, which paid more than $12.4 million during the 2016 campaign to a law firm called Perkins Coie. That legal outfit funneled cash to Fusion GPS, a political strategist firm, which in turn hired Steele.15 The Clinton campaign claimed all this as a legal expense and hid from the public its hiring of a notorious opposition research firm to dig up Russian dirt on Trump. Some people would call that a campaign finance violation, but Clinton got away with it—as usual.
The FBI went running with its dossier to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get a surveillance warrant on Carter Page, who in early 2016 joined the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser. The FISA court not only granted a warrant against Page in October 2016, it agreed to three additional renewals—putting Page under surveillance for nearly an entire year. The surveillance was extremely intrusive, including physical searches and authorization to spy on Page when he traveled abroad.16 And as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explained, FISA warrants don’t just cover “forward-going communications.” The Page warrants freed the FBI to snoop through any past Page calls, texts, or emails. “They were hoping to get a motherlode of communications involving Page and Trump campaign people,” McCarthy told radio’s Hugh Hewitt in 2018.17
We were right that the dirty dossier was the only reason the FBI could get its warrants. Comey obfuscated the facts about that early on, to protect the FBI. He told Fox News’s Bret Baier that “there was a significant amount of additional material about Page and why there was probable cause to believe he was an agent of a foreign power, and the dossier was part of that but was not all of it or a critical part of it, to my recollection.”18 Comey’s Fake News Media pals kept up that fiction for years.
We already knew Comey’s statements did not reflect reality, thanks to the Nunes memo, which was issued in February 2018 after House Intel members finally were allowed to review the FBI’s applications against Page. The memo said that the dossier “formed an essential part” of the Page applications, and that former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe testified to the committee in December 2017 that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the [FISA court] without the Steele dossier information.”19 It confirmed the FBI had hid from the FISA court the Clinton-DNC connection to the dossier (even though FBI officials knew about the shady connection and had been warned that Steele had a bias against Trump). It revealed that the FBI had given the court the dossier before it was vetted.
We also reported on a criminal referral of Steele from Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley that was declassified the same month. The Grassley-Graham document confirmed key sections of the Nunes memo, noting that the Page applications “relied heavily on Mr. Steele’s dossier claims”; that the FBI had failed to get “meaningful corroboration” of the dossier; and that the Bureau didn’t tell the FISA court about the Clinton cash or Steele’s bias. But the Grassley-Graham referral also delved into Steele’s credibility, tearing up the FBI’s claim to the court that Steele was a reliable source. Like the Nunes memo, the referral noted that the FBI had in fact fired Steele in October 2016 for leaking his dossier details to the press.20
Liberals and their press cheerleaders had a meltdown over both the memos and claimed Nunes, Grassley, and Graham were either lying or exaggerating. They were egged on by the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, the fact-challenged Adam Schiff, who issued a rival memo to the Nunes memo that bluntly declared, “FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the [FISA] process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.” It repeated Comey’s unsubstantiated statement, saying the FBI had made “only narrow use” of the dossier, and also claimed DOJ had been transparent about the Clinton connection.21 The press circled the wagons and presented his memo as truth.
In December 2019, the report by DOJ Inspector General Horowitz confirmed everything we’d reported on the FISA warrants on Carter Page:
The details were gorier than even we expected. Comey had insisted that the FBI had behaved perfectly. “I have total confidence that the FISA process was followed and that the entire case was handled in a thoughtful, responsible way by DOJ and the FBI,” he said.22 Even former Trump deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein made it sound as if it would be impossible for the FBI to hoodwink the court. In May 2018, he lambasted House Republicans who were investigating the FBI and boasted, “There’s a lot of talk about FISA applications. Many people I’ve seen talk about it seem not to recognize… In order to get a FISA warrant, you need an affidavit signed by a career federal law enforcement officer who swears that the information is true….”23
Or not. Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz blew up this narrative, reporting that the Clinton-bought-and-paid-for dossier “played a central and essential role in the FBI’s” decision to get the warrant to spy on Page.24 The FBI had wanted a warrant in August 2016, but government lawyers said the Bureau didn’t have enough evidence. It was only when the FBI investigating team (code name Crossfire Hurricane) obtained the Steele dossier on September 19, 2016, that the lawyers gave the green light.
The IG meanwhile went on to describe seventeen “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI’s applications.25 That’s a bureaucratic way of saying that the FBI repeatedly engaged in a premeditated fraud on the FISA court.
It turns out the Steele “intelligence” was little more than lies and conspiracy theories based largely on a single source who denied to the FBI that he had a network of sub-sources, as Steele repeatedly claimed.26 Steele himself described one supposed sub-source to the FBI as a “boaster” and an “egoist” and someone who “may engage in some embellishment.”27 The FBI didn’t bother to do any vetting of this source prior to submitting its application on Page. And when it finally got around to speaking to this person (starting in January 2017), the source said that he/she never even expected Steele to include “statements in reports or present them as facts” since “it was just talk.” The source “explained that his/her information came from ‘word of mouth and hearsay;’ ‘conversation that [he/she] had with friends over beers;’ and that some of the information, such as allegations about Trump’s sexual activities, were statements he/she heard made in ‘jest.’ ”28 In other words, the FBI’s source was relaying bar gossip.
Possibly even worse, declassified footnotes in the Horowitz report revealed that the FBI had multiple indications that the dossier was contaminated with Russian disinformation. It turns out that Steele had close connections with five Russian oligarchs who tried to use him as an intermediary to connect with the FBI. Meanwhile, sources providing information for the dossier had connections with Russian intelligence, and the FBI thought Russian agents may have targeted Steele’s private intelligence company.29 So when you heard about dossier allegations from all the media mobsters, leaking FBI agents, and Trump-hating Democrats like Shifty Adam Schiff, there’s a good chance they were spreading Russian disinformation.
The report also confirmed the FBI could never verify any of the dossier’s insane accusations. Why? Because—as we noted all along—they were unverifiable. As the IG wrote, the “Crossfire Hurricane team was unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations regarding Carter Page contained in Steele’s election reporting.”30 As we reported much earlier, the FBI put together a spreadsheet containing each of Steele’s allegations; it failed to confirm any of them. And that included the allegations it presented to the FISA court as proof that Page was a Russian asset. Pretty much the only thing the FBI ever managed to confirm, said the IG, was “publicly available information” such as dates or names. The dossier was a pack of lies.
The FBI never told any of this to the FISA court. It knowingly suppressed the damning facts about the reliability of this principal source and of Steele himself. The IG reported that in later FBI interviews, Steele couldn’t keep straight where he’d gotten all his information. His own primary source said Steele exaggerated or misstated claims. And when Bureau agents finally got around to talking to Steele’s former colleagues about the quality of his work, they were told repeatedly that Steele demonstrated “lack of self-awareness” and “poor judgment.”31 Yet instead of fessing up to the FISA court its discovery that its source and material were all a fraud, the FBI in application after application continued to present the Steele dossier as rock-solid.
Then there’s all the exculpatory information the FBI purposely left out of its application, facts that would have destroyed its case against Page. The FBI in the summer and fall of 2016 had sent “confidential human sources”—or what honest people call “spies”—to talk to Trump campaign members, including Page. In one conversation, Page told the FBI spy that he’d “literally never met” Paul Manafort. Page also denied ever having met two Russians who the dossier claimed were his collusion points of contact.32 Both these statements directly contradicted the dossier’s claims. But the FBI purposely didn’t tell the FISA court about these denials, despite a requirement to do so.
Worse, the FBI deliberately kept hidden from the court the crucial information that Page had actually been approved as an “operational contact” for the CIA from 2008 to 2013 and that he’d reported information to that agency about interactions he’d had with Russian intelligence officers. The man the FBI had accused of being “an agent of a foreign power” had actually worked with the CIA, serving the country he loves. The FBI didn’t just hide this crucial detail; it turned Page’s service against him, using his contact with the Russian officers as more “proof” that he was colluding. The IG reported that an FBI lawyer even went so far as to doctor an email from the CIA, to keep hidden from the court that Page had worked as a CIA source. Horowitz has referred that attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, for possible criminal prosecution.
Finally, Horowitz confirmed we were right that the FBI had been warned every which way that Steele was a political operator, out to take down Trump. Comey spun propaganda to the nation on this, too. In his interview on Fox, Baier asked Comey when he found out the dossier had been paid for by the Clinton rabble. Comey responded, “I still don’t know that for a fact. I’ve only seen it in the media.”33
Really, Comey? The IG report explains that Justice Department official Bruce Ohr—whose wife worked for Fusion GPS—went to FBI and DOJ officials with warnings that “Steele’s reporting was going to Clinton’s presidential campaign and others,” and that Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. president.”34 Steele also met in October 2016 with State Department officials, where he again rattled off his dossier conspiracy theories. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec told the FBI about her Steele meeting and pointed out that he had some information wrong—Steele had told her a conspiratorial ring of election saboteurs was being paid out of the Russian consulate in Miami, but there is no Russian consulate there.35
So the FBI was well aware even before it filed its application that Steele had credibility problems and was violating FBI rules by shopping his dossier to other Washington players.
One omission after another; one lie after another. Why lie about Page’s work for the CIA, the fact that he’d worked undercover and risked his life? Why not tell the court about the exculpatory statements Page made to an undercover FBI informant? Why not say up front that the Clinton campaign paid for this information? Why? Because the FBI knew that if they were truthful, if they were transparent, the court would have denied the application. The only way to view this is that the FBI engaged in a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud on the FISA court.
Not that the media mob will ever present it that way. When the devastating Horowitz judgment finally hit, the press largely ignored the parts about the FBI’s lies and distortion. It instead went into overdrive to distort two pieces of the report. First, it focused on Horowitz’s finding that the investigation had “sufficient predicate.” The media spun this to mean that the FBI was justified in launching a defcon investigation into a presidential campaign.
In fact, Horowitz went out of his way in the report to note several times that the “threshold” for starting an FBI probe is so “low” as to be nonexistent. The FBI has sweeping authority to probe pretty much anything. Horowitz also made a point of expressing his concern at finding that there were no existing rules requiring the FBI to get senior approval before launching a probe into a “sensitive” matter like a “major party presidential campaign.”36
The media’s second obsession was the following line in the report: “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open” the investigation. “Report On F.B.I. Russia Inquiry Finds Serious Errors But Debunks Anti-Trump Plot,” screamed the New York Times headline. The report was a “triple rebuke to Trump’s conspiracy theories,” wrote Aaron Blake at the Washington Post.
This is the classic example of Fake News Media lying, lying, lying. Take apart that Horowitz statement. All he is saying is that his team didn’t find any smoking-gun email in the form of Comey saying the goal of his probe was to remove Trump.
But Horowitz found plenty of bias and included it in his findings. That included the text messages of disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page, a former FBI lawyer. The duo refers to Trump as a “loathsome human” and an “utter idiot.” In August 2016 a frantic Page texted the following to her lover: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok responded: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”37 Strzok only a week later texted about the FBI’s need for an “insurance policy” in case Trump was elected. This was the man who was front and center on the anti-Trump probe, and his texts make more than clear that his “insurance policy” was an FBI investigation designed to undo the 2016 election.
In his congressional testimony, Horowitz himself directly contradicted the media claims of “no bias.” “There is such a range of conduct here that is inexplicable. And the answers we got were not satisfactory. That we are left trying to understand how could all these errors have occurred over a nine month period, among three teams, handpicked, in one of the highest profile if not the highest profile case in the FBI, going to the very top of the organization, involving a presidential campaign.” Horowitz also said this: “On the one hand, gross incompetence, negligence? On the other hand, intentionality? And where in between? We weren’t in a position, with the evidence we had, to make that conclusion [of intentionality], but I’m not ruling it out.”38
Attorney General William Barr put it more starkly in an NBC interview: “The core statement, in my opinion, by the IG, is that these irregularities, these misstatements, these omissions were not satisfactorily explained. And I think that leaves open the possibility to infer bad faith.” Barr summed up the broader findings this way: “Our nation was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press. I think there were gross abuses of FISA, and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI.”39
How did this happen in our great country? How does one political party get away with feeding disinformation to our law enforcement and provoke a counterintelligence probe into a rival campaign? How does the FBI get away with turning its powerful tools on the man the United States citizenry elected as president? How do we end up with a special counsel who completely ignores FBI abuse and instead spends two years tyrannizing the Trump White House? How do we get stuck with a media horde that reports lie after lie, all to help the Democratic Party?
The answer: this is the swamp. The nation was put through hell for three years because a cabal of politicians, investigators, and media liars decided to put their own political agenda ahead of the country’s institutions and well-being. They ignored the rules, they trampled on the Constitution, and they threw over basic decency, all so that they could take out a president who had vowed to clean up that swamp.
Let’s be clear: there are specific individuals who are responsible for this epic scandal. The FBI is and remains the premier law enforcement agency in the world, and 99 percent of its agents are heroes. They are out protecting this country every day. The Russia witch hunt was instead about the 1 percent who abused their power for corrupt reasons.
At the top of that list is Mr. Super Patriot himself, Jim Comey. He spent his entire Washington career parading around as holier-than-thou. The guy even had the gall, after Trump fired him for incompetence, to write a book titled A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. We rely on individuals in powerful positions to guard the government against political dirty tricks like the Clinton dossier. Comey instead invited the bad guys in and put his FBI at their disposal.
Consider that word: “leadership.” After Comey was fired, he was the subject of two other Horowitz reports even before the inspector general released his one on FISA abuse. The first excoriated Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton server case. You remember the one? Where the FBI treated the Clinton campaign with kid gloves even after Clinton mishandled classified information, deleted subpoenaed emails, and acid-washed her hard drive with BleachBit to disappear whatever she was hiding. Instead of charging Clinton with a crime, Comey broke the chain of command, going around his superiors to call a press conference at which he spent fifteen minutes slamming her for being “extremely careless.”
That IG report found that Comey was no leader. It denounced him for being “insubordinate,” usurping Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s authority by doing that press conference.40 It rebuked him for using the media conference to make derogatory statements about a person the DOJ was declining to prosecute. The report was perfectly consistent with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo recommending Comey be fired, in which Rosenstein wrote, “[Comey] laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”41
The second Horowitz report on the former FBI director, issued in August 2019, destroyed Comey’s infamous claims that he doesn’t leak or do “weasel moves.” Turns out that after Trump fired Comey, Mr. Super Patriot had swiped four government memos detailing his private conversations with the president and stashed them in his home safe. Comey leaked the memos to his private attorneys, including one containing classified information, and also had a buddy leak the contents of one to the New York Times. These documents were so sensitive that FBI agents showed up at the disgraced former director’s front door to retrieve them.
Horowitz found, “By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees—and the many thousands more former FBI employees—who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information.”42 The IG found Comey’s handling and dissemination of the memos violated FBI policies and his own employment agreement, and Horowitz referred Comey for federal prosecution for mishandling classified information. Only the DOJ declined to prosecute. Why? Because Comey made certain none of the memos were “marked” as classified when he was director; only after he was fired did the memos undergo a classification review. So Comey could claim that nothing was officially classified at the time he mishandled the information. How’s that for a weasel move?
Speaking of weasel moves, also consider this: Comey admitted the entire reason he leaked that memo information to the New York Times was to pressure the DOJ to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump-Russia collusion. Thanks to all the Horowitz digging, however, we now know that by that time, Comey and his corrupt FBI cronies knew the collusion claim was a lie. They knew Clinton was behind the dossier, that Steele was a dirty political operator, that his own main source admitted the dossier was unconfirmed gossip, and that they hadn’t verified a single accusation. Yet Comey still schemed to appoint a special prosecutor, who spent two more years putting the country through hell. This one leak alone shows how political Comey was from the get-go. This was an FBI director out to get President Trump.
Or how about his underhanded ensnaring of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn? Only a few days after Trump was sworn into office, the FBI sent agents to interview the general about his transition-period conversations with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. They’d discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia and a UN resolution condemning Israel. The FBI concocted the outrageous theory that Flynn might have violated the Logan Act, a law that bars U.S. citizens from engaging with foreign governments without sign-off. No serious person prosecutes the Logan Act. Only two people have ever been indicted for violating the act, and the last one was in 1852.
Comey later bragged that he took advantage of the “chaos” of the new administration by sending agents to interview Flynn without following protocol. That FBI interview was something “I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized investigation, more organized administration, in the George W. Bush administration, for example, or the Obama administration,” Comey boasted in 2018. “In both of those administrations, there was a process. And so, if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel and there would be discussions and approvals, and who would be there. And I thought, it’s early enough. Let’s just send a couple guys over.”43
The sick reality is that Comey didn’t need to ask Flynn about those conversations. The FBI already had the transcripts. The only reason to interview Flynn was to set him up for a perjury trap. This was confirmed by handwritten notes taken after a meeting consisting of Comey, McCabe, and FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap, in which the note taker—presumably Priestap—asked if the goal of the Flynn interrogation was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”44 And McCabe admitted that he lulled Flynn into thinking he didn’t need a lawyer present for the interview and purposely omitted the standard warning against lying to the FBI. They wanted Flynn “relaxed.”45 It later emerged that the FBI had decided to close its investigation of Flynn weeks before his interview, having found no derogatory information on him, but Strzok intervened, saying his superiors wanted it kept open.46
Flynn had conducted hundreds of discussions during the presidential transition, and his recollections of the Kislyak conversation didn’t match what was in the transcript. The FBI interviewing agents nonetheless said they saw “nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying.”47 And why would he intentionally lie? Flynn had headed the Defense Intelligence Agency and surely knew the FBI was monitoring Kislyak’s calls. Despite all this, Mueller went after Flynn for “lying,” driving him to the edge of bankruptcy and threatening to indict Flynn’s son on unrelated issues. Flynn fell on his sword for his family and pleaded guilty to lying.
This is how the FBI and a special prosecutor treated a thirty-three-year veteran who protected his country over many years in combat. They set him up, put the screws to him, and gloated over their “plea deal.” The case was drenched in malfeasance and could proceed only as long as the evidence of the government’s abuses stayed hidden. Once Attorney General Barr appointed prosecutor Jeff Jensen to review the case, and Jensen began producing that evidence, the case disintegrated. Despite the judge’s outrageous resistance, the Department of Justice then sought to drop the prosecution, admitting there was no legitimate reason for the FBI to have interviewed Flynn in the first place.
How about Saint Jim’s claims that he doesn’t lie? Comey signed off on the very first FISA application against Page and then two more renewals. Every one of those warrant requests was marked “verified” at the top of the document. He swore three times that the evidence in those applications was true, accurate, and verified. None of it was.
He also misled President-elect Trump when he went to “warn” him about the dossier in January 2017. Comey outright told Trump that he was not the target of an investigation. But one of the Horowitz reports revealed that Comey was using that meeting to probe Trump for information and to get his reaction to the dirty dossier. He didn’t tell Trump that just a couple of months earlier he’d signed a FISA into one of his campaign aides. He instead told Trump the very dossier that he’d verified as truthful in that application was “salacious and unverified.”48
About the only FBI official who even competed with Comey on the liar front was his deputy. Andrew McCabe was also fired from the FBI for lying. Horowitz issued a separate report about McCabe’s behavior in February 2018, a seething rebuke of the fired deputy director. It examined McCabe’s role in disclosing the existence of an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. McCabe’s wife had run for state election in Virginia and taken money from a Clinton ally, and McCabe was getting questioned over his impartiality. So he authorized the release of information to the Wall Street Journal, resulting in a story that suggested McCabe was heroically pushing forward a Clinton investigation.
The Horowitz report slammed him for a leak designed solely to “advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership” and for lying about the leak. The IG said McCabe was guilty of “lack of candor”—that’s “lying” in FBI-speak—at least three times under oath in talks with investigators. He also told Comey he didn’t know who was behind the leak. And he was unclear with investigators about what he’d told Comey.49 And he blamed FBI colleagues for his own leak. This troubled relationship with the truth is presumably why Fake News CNN hired McCabe as a commentator—he fits right in.
This is the same McCabe who says that in the spring of 2017 he discussed with Rosenstein a plan to have the deputy attorney general wear a wire during conversations with Trump and secretly try to recruit cabinet members to remove the president under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.50 Assuming McCabe’s being honest just this once, let’s call this what it was: McCabe was actively working to stage a coup against the commander in chief.
Yet McCabe also skipped out of jail time. Washington prosecutors ended his case in February 2020, after the same disgraced FBI cabal that caused this mess came to his rescue. The New York Times earlier reported, “A key witness in the case—Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer whom Mr. McCabe authorized to speak to the Wall Street Journal reporter—also told the grand jury that he was not motivated to lie about the episode…. Her sympathetic testimony to Mr. McCabe would most likely be a problem for prosecutors.”51
These FBI officials weren’t the only government players engaged in mass corruption. They had help from the intel community. Never forget Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s warning to Trump in January 2017. The Obama intel groups had rushed to release their official “assessment” of Russian interference in the 2016 election and to distort intelligence to claim that Putin had interfered specifically to get Trump elected. The president-elect correctly pointed out that intelligence forces were playing politics. Schumer crowed that Trump would rue the day he said that. “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community—they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC.52
They were already sabotaging Trump under the direction of partisans like former CIA head John Brennan. Intel community leaders were part of the plot to gin up the investigation into Trump, his associates, his campaign, his transition, and later his presidency. And they were likely behind the leaks of raw intelligence designed to sabotage Trump team members like Flynn.
Since crawling from the CIA straight into the arms of NBC News and MSNBC, Brennan has repeatedly made vicious, bitter accusations against Trump. He’s called the president’s behavior “treasonous” and once raged on Twitter at Trump, “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.” Maybe no surprise then that in a May 2017 congressional hearing, Brennan claimed he was the guy behind the Trump investigation. He said the CIA discovered intelligence about contacts between Russian officials and Americans and made sure every “bit” of it was shared with the FBI. He claimed those details “served as the basis for the FBI investigation.”53
Brennan is also the reason the story exploded on the public in the fall of 2016. Brennan kept pushing through the spring and summer of 2016 for the intel community to take the line that Russia was working to get Trump elected, but he couldn’t convince some of his colleagues to go that far. So he used an August meeting with former Senate minority leader Harry Reid to voice his conspiracy theory. And sure enough, Mr. Reid instantly sent a letter to Comey—which leaked—asking about the “direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.” He demanded the FBI launch a full investigation, just as Brennan had hoped.54
It was law enforcement and intel figures who perpetrated the corruption. But we also need to hold to account the people who then aided it and covered it up, pursuing their own agenda against Trump. Mueller is at the top of that list. Mueller had the opportunity—the obligation—to get to the truth about the political corruption, the dossier, the FBI’s abuse of power, and its lies. He instead kept alive the FBI’s collusion hoax for years, feeding the fevered anti-Trump press and undermining the Trump administration’s ability to govern.
The fix was in the minute Mueller chose for his team the same Obama holdovers who had worked side by side with Comey and McCabe and former deputy attorney general Sally Yates on their Trump takedown. That included prosecutors like Andrew “Pit Bull” Weissmann and Jeannie Rhee, both fervent Democrats. Of the seventeen attorneys whom Mueller had publicly appointed by 2018, thirteen were registered Democrats and half of those had donated to Clinton’s presidential campaign.55 This group hired an army of investigators, subpoenaed millions of documents, and spent more than $30 million in a desperate attempt to prove a collusion accusation that the FBI already knew was false.
Mueller’s team left a trail of devastation. It went after Flynn and other Trump officials for “lying” to the FBI or the special counsel. That included George Papadopoulos, who from the start had cooperated with the FBI and the special counsel investigation but was sentenced to two weeks in jail anyway. The team jailed former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort for unrelated financial crimes. Ditto former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Manafort—who was never accused of any violent crimes—was held in solitary confinement and locked in a cell for twenty-three hours a day as part of an intense pressure campaign to get him to plead guilty. Roger Stone endured a predawn raid by more than a dozen armed FBI agents at his house, where a CNN news crew just happened to be positioned at the time. This is not how our American democracy and system of justice are supposed to work.
And yet here’s what Mueller never found: a single case of a Trump person conspiring with Russians. His final 448-page report had to admit he failed to discover a shred of evidence to support the insane conspiracy theories of the prior three years.
Still, Mueller’s team couldn’t leave it at that—his report included an entire second section meditating on whether President Trump had committed “obstruction of justice” throughout the Mueller probe. The team was furious Trump had questioned their motives and denounced their probe as a “witch hunt.” So they devoted 187 pages to Trump’s tweets and whether he had ordered Mueller fired. The very fact that Mueller completed his project—and was provided every resource he needed—was proof there was never any obstruction. Unable to recommend prosecution for a nonexistent crime, Mueller left it to DOJ superiors to decide whether his obstruction “evidence” was worthy of an indictment. The DOJ determined there was absolutely no ground for a case, but Mueller’s real interest was in providing Democrats in Congress a road map for impeachment.
Cue the Mueller House testimony of July 2019. Democrats vowed the special counsel would bring his report “to life.”56 They promised Mueller would swoop in and prove that Trump remained an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a separate Mueller prosecution—thereby laying the groundwork for impeachment. Instead, Mueller’s stumbling, incoherent House testimony was an epic embarrassment. He spent the day confused and dazed, unable to remember basic facts, slow to comprehend questions, and evasive or clueless on anything to do with Hillary, the dossier, or obvious FBI malfeasance. “I’m not going to get into that” was his favorite line. By the end, the media was in mourning, the most depressed they’d been since Trump was elected.
Republicans on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees did their job: they highlighted just how badly Mueller had failed in his most basic mission. The special counsel’s job was to look at Russian interference in the 2016 election, but he failed to investigate what the FBI itself strongly suspected: that the Russians interfered in the election by feeding disinformation into Christopher Steele’s dossier. In fact, Mueller’s team was so intent on protecting the FBI, it refused to investigate the dossier at all. “Can you state with confidence the Steele dossier was not part of Russia’s disinformation campaign?” Florida congressman Matt Gaetz asked the special counsel during the hearing. Mueller dodged, saying questions about the dossier “predated” him.57
Another hype-and-cover-up award goes to crazed congressional Democrats. To serve as one of the country’s elected congressional representatives is one of the highest honors in the land. Sure, we expect the political parties to engage in spin and politics. But we also expect them to play by the rules of the game, abide by the Constitution, and tell the truth.
Democrats for decades positioned themselves as the party of “civil liberties,” the party that cared the most about intrusive government surveillance. Some of them probably really believed it. But that’s what makes their actions throughout the Russian hoax all the harder to stomach. They were willing to abandon every principle they’d ever claimed—cheering on the FBI’s violations of Carter Page’s liberties and its manufacturing of process crimes against other wrongly accused Trump aides—in order to hide their party’s role in the dossier trick and to try to remove Trump from office.
When Congressman Devin Nunes in March 2017 uncovered evidence that the Obama White House had in its waning days been unmasking the names of Trump transition officials in intelligence reports, he held a press conference. He was convinced his news that an outgoing administration had been surveilling an incoming one would provoke strong bipartisan condemnation. Yet even the seasoned Nunes—who was used to partisan warfare—was shocked by Democrats’ response. Instead of joining him to ask for answers, they accused him of mishandling classified information. They were still in a rage about the Trump win and willing to say or do anything to protect the corrupt actions of Obama officials.
Leading the Democratic assault on Nunes was none other than his counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff. I’ll have a lot more on Shifty Schiff in the next chapter on impeachment. But suffice it to say the Russian hoax was where Schiff first cemented his reputation as a congenital liar.
After Trump was inaugurated, Schiff spent more than two years distorting and perverting Intel Committee information, misleading the public into believing the dossier hoax. The more Nunes and Republican members of the committee unraveled the truth of the dossier-FBI lies, the more Schiff publicly doubled down, telling Americans he had proof that Trump was a Manchurian candidate. As early as March 2017—before Comey was fired or Mueller hired—Schiff told NBC’s Chuck Todd that “there is more than circumstantial evidence” of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia.58 In December 2017, he revealed the supposed details to CNN’s Jake Tapper: “The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help and the president made full use of that help.”59 The Mueller report proved every word of this Schiff statement a lie, but the public wouldn’t get that truth for another eighteen months. Schiff engaged in the same pattern of deception with his memo on the Carter Page FISA applications, claiming the FBI committed no abuses whatsoever and that the dossier information used in the applications was corroborated. But again, the country had to wait nearly two years for Horowitz to set the record straight.
While Schiff was publicly hoodwinking the nation, behind the scenes he was working to obstruct and hinder Republican efforts to get to the truth. He objected to nearly every element of Nunes’s FISA abuse investigation—including the subpoena that eventually revealed that the Democrats had funded the dossier—and his legal staff objected to Republican questions during depositions to help shield witnesses (like Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson) from answering. Schiff’s steady stream of falsehoods was designed to undercut Republican facts, to give the media mobsters new, shiny tales to chase.
Most damaging, Schiff acted as chief spokesman for the Democratic campaign to present the entire Republican effort to get to the truth as nothing more than damaging partisan politics. Asked about GOP concerns about bias on the Mueller team, Schiff in that same December Tapper interview said, “The intent here is nothing short of discrediting Mueller, then discrediting the Justice Department, then discrediting the FBI, then discrediting the judiciary… this is an effort to tear at the very idea that there is an objective truth.”60
Schiff’s colleague in the Senate, Intelligence Committee vice chairman Mark Warner, was no better. At the center of the Senate’s bipartisan Russia investigation, Warner must have known there was never any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. Yet to this day, he insists Trump may have been conspiring with Putin to win the election. They all do. Democrats promised Mueller would be the final word on their conspiracy theory. But now that we have the truth, have any of them accepted that judgment? Have any of them apologized? Not at all. The Russia conspiracy theories go on.
Aided, of course, by the final, fraudulent players in this scandal: the media. The press continues to pretend to be arbiters of truth and facts. But the Russia hoax showed them to be nothing more than a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. They spent three years peddling baseless conspiracy theories simply because they fit a vengeful, psychotic, anti-Trump narrative.
For more than a thousand days, it was Russia, Russia, Russia, with minute-by-minute headlines. Americans were told Trump campaign members had engaged in repeated interactions with Russian intelligence; that Trump Jr. and Michael Cohen and Carter Page and Roger Stone were all Russian cutouts; that the Russians had a server in Trump Tower; that Manafort secretly met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London; that the National Rifle Association laundered Russian money for the Trump campaign. All complete lies. And all from supposedly legitimate “news” outfits: the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, McClatchy, CNN, MSNBC, and many others.
And when the press isn’t lying, it’s busy spinning its narrative—again, all to undermine Trump. They promised us that Steele was a brilliant spymaster and that the FBI was motivated by nothing but good intentions. They assured that the government had fail-proof safeguards to protect against surveillance abuse and that anybody who suggested otherwise was spinning a “conspiracy theory.”
We at the Hannity TV and radio shows were among the people most frequently accused by this preening press corps of floating those conspiracies. And again, that’s why the Horowitz report was so valuable. We never went out with a story until we had corroboration; we crossed every “t” and dotted every “i.” We told the country the truth.
It was the swamp that perpetrated a massive fraud on the nation.
For all we learned from the Horowitz report, there’s still much we don’t know. Horowitz couldn’t issue subpoenas or empanel a grand jury. He was entitled to speak only to currently employed members of the DOJ and FBI, which meant he had to rely on the cooperation of former employees. Some weren’t very helpful. Horowitz reported, for instance, that “loyal” Jim Comey refused to have his security clearance renewed as part of his interview—a clear attempt to evade tough questions related to classified information.61 Horowitz also couldn’t interview witnesses in other intel agencies or private or political actors.
But current U.S. attorney John Durham has no such constraints. Attorney General William Barr in May 2019 assigned the Connecticut prosecutor the job of investigating the origins of the Trump investigation. Durham’s reputation is that of a crack investigator, with a history of probing government malfeasance. His past jobs included looking into accusations of CIA abuse of detainees and the FBI’s ties to mob figures in Boston. He’s widely respected as tough and no-nonsense.
There are already indications Durham is digging into the spring of 2016, the crucial months prior to the FBI opening up its “official” counterintelligence investigation. Indeed, when Horowitz issued his report, Durham took the rare step of issuing a public statement that took issue with the IG’s claim of sufficient “predicate.” While he had “utmost respect” for the work Horowitz put into his report, Durham’s team did “not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”62
Durham will hopefully get to the truth about whether the United States was outsourcing intelligence gathering to friendly countries like Italy, Great Britain, and Australia in order to circumvent laws against spying on Americans. He needs to look into the political side of this equation, and what role Fusion GPS, Democrats, and Obama officials had from the start, and what they knew as it went along. What were the roles of Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former national security adviser Susan Rice, and former attorney general Loretta Lynch? What, for that matter, did Barack Obama know? We now know that Brennan, Clapper, Biden, former ambassador Samantha Power, former Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough, and dozens of other Obama officials unmasked Flynn’s name in intelligence reports. We need to know which other Trump associates were unmasked and who criminally leaked information on them.
By October 2019 Durham had transitioned his probe into a full-fledged criminal investigation, giving him subpoena power and the ability to empanel a grand jury and file charges. That announcement is excellent news, because it finally holds out the potential for equal justice.
The Russia hoaxers did great damage to the country. They weaponized our most powerful intelligence tools, committed a fraud on an intelligence court, killed faith in our institutions, destroyed the reputations and lives of American citizens, and attempted to remove a duly elected president. But the great casualty has been equal justice.
I like to use the WWHTH standard. What Would Happen To Hannity? If an inspector general determined I was a liar and leaker, I’d go to jail. If I deliberately deceived a court, presenting it with “verified” information that I knew wasn’t true, I’d be behind bars. Or imagine if Trump had a private server containing classified material and chose to delete 33,000 subpoenaed emails and destroy the evidence? The media mob would be howling for his removal.
But Hillary Clinton never faced any charges for mishandling top secret material and acid-washing her hard drives. Mueller went after Manafort and Papadopoulos and Cohen and Flynn for lying. Some may spend years in jail. But James Comey cashes in on a book, and McCabe lands a cushy job at CNN. We have laws against leaking classified information. We have laws against spying on Americans. And so far, not one person has yet been held to account.
If we don’t have equal application of our laws, we might as well shred the Constitution. We cannot have dual justice in this country. We cannot have one system that applies to corrupt actors in the upper echelons of government, and one that applies to the rest of us. The Durham investigation will not only provide us information, but, hopefully, will answer the crucial question of whether we can still have faith in our system of government.