By Jerry Dunleavy

Published: August 4, 2025 11:00pm

Updated: August 5, 2025 10:22am

The former spy chief who organized and co-authored the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter ahead of the 2020 election also played a key role in helping Hillary Clinton in 2016 smear Donald Trump by tying him to Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Mike Morell, the former acting CIA director, injected into the American political bloodstream the idea that Trump was an “agent” of Putin and Russia, a refrain that would be repeated over and over again by the Clinton campaign.

Similar to recruiting 51 ex-spies in 2020 to falsely claim the laptop was somehow tied to Russia, Morell also led a letter in 2016 signed by over 50 former national security officials who insinuated Trump had nefarious links to Putin’s Russia.

Morell’s claims would be heavily relied upon by the Clinton campaign throughout the summer and fall of 2016, and Clinton would personally and repeatedly tout Morell’s endorsement and his claims about Trump and Putin.

Newly declassified evidence shows the FBI was alerted to intelligence in 2016 indicating Clinton planned to smear Trump by linking him to Russia in an effort to distract from her scandal surrounding the sending of classified emails on an illicit email server.

That same intelligence, gathered from Russia, also suggested the FBI's leaders played right into the campaign's strategy by conducting a sweeping investigation into false claims of Trump-Russia collusion.

Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri strongly implied in a 2017 Washington Post article that the Clinton campaign had sought Morell out in the summer of 2016 to encourage him to weigh in publicly about Trump and Russia, and Clinton herself also hinted at this in her 2017 campaign memoir, What Happened.

Morrell told the New York Times that he decided to weigh in in 2016 on his own and not due to outside considerations.

As reported by Just the News, public records show Clinton herself, in coordination with Palmieri, her campaign general counsel Marc Elias, campaign manager Robby Mook, campaign chairman John Podesta, campaign policy adviser Jake Sullivan, and others launched an effort to link Trump to Putin as the 2016 battle for the White House raged.

The Clinton campaign also funded through its law firm British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s now-discredited dossier and spread the false claims of a secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank.

Newly declassified evidence dubbed the "Clinton Plan intelligence" included purported intercepted communications from a George Soros ally suggesting that Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Trump was plotting an effort to demonize the Republican nominee by connecting him to Putin, and that the Clinton campaign expected the FBI would put more fuel on the fire.

https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/hunter-biden-laptop-letter-author-helped-carry-out-clinton-plan-tying-trump

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The declassified revelations from special counsel John Durham’s report included purported emails from Leonard Benardo, a top official at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and alleged communications by Clinton foreign policy adviser Julianne Smith. Benardo denied writing the messages, while Smith said she didn’t remember having done so but couldn’t rule out proposing such a Clinton plan.

The newly declassified annex of the report also shows Durham found some corroborating evidence for the intercepts but concluded the purported emails from Benardo were likely mashups or composites of what Russian spies had probably collected from multiple Clinton allies.

Smith was the head of the Clinton campaign’s Europe team and worked as a foreign policy advisor for the failed 2016 bid. Smith had been deputy national security advisor to then-Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama administration.

The Durham classified annex assessed that “it is a logical deduction [REDACTED] [Julianne] Smith was, at minimum, playing a role in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to tie Trump to Russia," and that the communications reviewed by the special counsel “certainly lends at least some credence that such a plan existed.”

Clinton herself was previously asked about the Clinton Plan intelligence, and told Durham’s team in an interview that it "looked like Russian disinformation to me; they're very good at it, you know."

But Morell’s actions — and the Clinton’s embrace of his baseless framing of Trump as a Russian agent and Putin stooge — provide evidence the Clinton campaign did in fact carry out a political dirty trick.

Durham’s 2023 public report revealed that “the Intelligence Community received the Clinton Plan intelligence in late July 2016.”

Palmieri wrote in her 2017 Washington Post story that “the week after the convention” in late July 2016 “we sought out credible national security voices to sound alarms” and that “I was surprised by the enthusiasm with which some, such as former acting CIA director Michael Morell, jumped into the fray.”

“When I worked in the Obama White House, people in national security positions had been uneasy making broad public arguments, particularly about political matters. Not this time,” Palmieri wrote in 2017. “They were so concerned about the situation that, to me, the language they used to describe the threat they believed Russia and Trump posed was shocking.”

Palmieri said that “I remember my jaw dropping as I sat in our Brooklyn campaign headquarters and read the op-ed Morell submitted to the New York Times in early August [2016]” as she linked to Morell’s piece.

Clinton also discussed the Morell opinion piece in her book What Happened, a post-mortem she penned on the 2016 election.

“Maybe the press wouldn’t listen to us, but I figured they would listen to respected intelligence officials. On August 5, Mike Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, wrote a highly unusual op-ed in the New York Times. Despite being a strictly nonpartisan career professional, he said that he had decided to endorse me for President because of my strong record on national security, including my role in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. By contrast, he said Trump was 'not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.' Coming from America’s former top spy, that was a shocking statement. But it paled compared with what Morell said next.”

ABC News reported in early August 2016 that “a flood of prominent Republicans in recent weeks announced their support for Clinton over Trump, including … former acting CIA Director Mike Morell” and that “the recruitment effort has been spearheaded by Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta.”

https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/hunter-biden-laptop-letter-author-helped-carry-out-clinton-plan-tying-trump

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Morell