Tuesday’s explosive news — that long before the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community had asked foreign intel agencies to surveil 26 people connected to Donald Trump — raises the question of whether our intelligence community colluded with the Clinton campaign in these efforts. After all, it was then-Biden campaign adviser and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who “set in motion the events that led to” 51 former intel officials issuing the public statement that falsely framed the Hunter Biden’s laptop story as Russian disinformation.
If a Biden campaign adviser conspired with some of the biggest names in the intelligence community a month before the 2020 election to bury the damaging scandal, it is no stretch to think the Hillary Clinton campaign might have sought an assist from the same folks to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
We’ve also long known the Clinton campaign funded the Steele dossier, the primary evidence used by the FBI to obtain four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretap orders against a Trump campaign associate. The Clinton campaign’s efforts to peddle the Russia-collusion hoax to the FBI and the media are likewise well-established.
But did the Clinton campaign’s plot to portray Trump as a Russian asset also involve the intelligence community, and if so, when did those efforts start?
Open-source material suggests the Clinton campaign’s efforts to push the Russia angle against Trump began in June 2016, when the Democrat law firm Perkins Coie contracted with Fusion GPS, which in turn retained Christopher Steele to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia. While there are several connections between the Clinton campaign and members of the intelligence community beginning in July, there is a dearth of evidence suggesting coordination between the two before then.
That does not mean there was none, or that the Obama administration’s intelligence community wasn’t seeking to help Clinton by enlisting its foreign Five Eyes allies — the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia — to target Trump. The evidence to date, however, and specifically sources’ recent statements to journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag, suggest our intelligence agencies launched the Russia-collusion hoax months before the Clinton campaign joined in full force.
Revisiting the timeline, however, suggests something further: that members of the intelligence community may have hinted that the Clinton campaign should advance a Russia-collusion narrative premised on the same sort of intel coming from the foreign intelligence services.
Here, we have two key data points. First, declassified handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan memorialized him briefing then-President Obama on intelligence that Clinton, on July 26, 2016, had approved “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
Second, two weeks earlier, then-Clinton campaign foreign policy adviser and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke at the “2016 Race to Change the World” conference in Cambridge on July 11-12, 2016. Albright’s fellow speakers included, among others, Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former defense and foreign secretary. Also in attendance was Stefan Halper, who would later serve as a confidential human source for the FBI during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Halper had also reportedly served as a source for the CIA.
The organizer of that conference, Steven Schrage, has publicly claimed that during the various events, Halper ignored Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page until after Dearlove arrived. Halper then “seemed desperately interested in isolating, cornering, and ingratiating himself to Page and promoting himself to the Trump campaign,” according to Schrage.
Page would soon be the Democrats’ poster boy representing Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia. It isn’t that Page was present at that conference that should catch people’s eyes, however, but that Albright, Dearlove, and Halper were. Because according to Brennan, two weeks later, on July 26, 2016, one of Hillary’s foreign policy advisers pitched the Russia-collusion hoax.
The crumbs all lead to Albright, who fits the description and had just returned from Cambridge, where she had conversed with individuals connected to foreign intel agencies, including one of the Five Eyes that Brennan had tasked with connecting Trump associates to Russia. If so, that would mean individuals connected to the foreign intelligence communities were not merely gathering intel on Trump and his associates to share with U.S. intelligence agencies but that they also conspired with the Clinton campaign to further the Russia-collusion hoax.
There’s an irony here, however, as Brennan also gathered evidence on Clinton and her campaign’s plot to paint Trump as a Russian stooge to distract from her own scandals.
So it seems our intelligence community spies on everyone. But it only puts its knowledge to use when it wants to get back at someone — and then it has six ways from Sunday to do so.