How Trump's Own Appointees Aided Russiagate Plot Against Him
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/how-trumps-own-appointees-aided-russiagate-plot-against-him
When Obama administration officials manufactured U.S. intelligence tying Donald Trump to Moscow following his stunning 2016 victory, they had no idea Trump’s own political appointees would help them undermine Trump’s presidency – and his chances of reelection in 2020.
RCI’s review of recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews with former Trump officials reveals for the first time how key members of Trump’s cabinet and other appointees during his first term shrouded the previous administration’s machinations and either deliberately or inadvertently misled the public into thinking the fake Russiagate intelligence was real.
John Bolton
The suppression can be traced back at least until mid-2018. That’s when Fred Fleitz, who was National Security Adviser John Bolton’s chief of staff, heard that investigators at his former employer, the House Intelligence Committee, were probing the raw intelligence in the ICA supporting the assessment's key judgments.
A one-time CIA analyst himself, Fleitz was curious to learn what they had found during the previous year, interviewing CIA analysts and reviewing secret documents at Langley. So, he traveled to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and read a draft of the highly classified report in a secure room of the U.S. Capitol.
Mike Pompeo
What Fleitz did not know at the time was that the CIA was also hindering the House probe of the ICA. As Trump’s first CIA chief, Mike Pompeo was skeptical that his predecessor Brennan had gotten the Russia intelligence assessment as wrong as he was hearing from the autopsy conducted by the House Intelligence Committee. “We showed him a draft but he didn’t believe it. He said we have to be wrong on a lot of this stuff,” said Derek Harvey, who worked as a senior analysis adviser with the House Intelligence Committee from 2017 to 2022.
As a result, he said, “We didn’t get a lot of cooperation from Pompeo.”
Gina Haspel
Pompeo’s deputy at the time was Gina Haspel, who appears to have played a much more active role in drawing a veil over the information. A veteran CIA official whom Pompeo had put in charge of most of the day-to-day operations of the agency, she apparently didn’t appreciate congressional staffers investigating the agency’s spycraft that went into the highly classified and restricted version of the ICA.
Sources told RCI she made sure the investigators’ on-site examination, which spanned from 2017 to 2020, was closely monitored and tightly controlled. The House investigators had to be cleared into a “read room” at Langley each day to examine the records the CIA used to support the ICA. And they were forced to lock up their laptops and materials there when they left at night.
John Durham
Nevertheless, as Trump’s first term drew to a close, there was one more opportunity to expose the Obama administration’s machinations. Ironically, that was forestalled by the special counsel who had been appointed to investigate the origins of the Russiagate hoax, John Durham. It was Trump’s attorney general, Barr, who tapped Durham, an old DOJ colleague and friend.
While Durham’s final report, which was not issued until 2023, raised serious questions about the Russiagate probe, his most significant decision may have occurred in the final days of the 2020 election when he quashed efforts to expose the plot to weaponize U.S. intelligence.
“They rigged and politicized the intelligence,” added Fleitz, “and that was obvious to anyone who read that dynamite report.” This included Barr, Durham, Bolton, Pompeo, Haspel, and other Trump appointees who, instead of exposing the scandal, suppressed it.