Tag Archive for: Steele dossier

In Wake Of ‘Russiagate’ Revelations, Americans Are Demanding Indictments — Who Could Be First?

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Americans have called for officials to face consequences after the July declassification of documents regarding the intelligence community’s (IC) role in the false narrative that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election, but the Trump administration could face legal hurdles.

A recent poll found that more than two-thirds of Americans want someone held accountable for what is now deemed “Russiagate” — and with JD Vance’s Sunday claim that “a lot of people [are going to] get indicted,” people are curious to see who will be held accountable by the grand jury investigation.

Former President Barack Obama’s Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) James Comey could be high on a list of potential indictments.

Comey headed the agency during the initiation and primary phase of the investigations into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election and accusations of potential connections between members of the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Comey was directly involved in the investigation. He told Congress the FBI had not verified the now-debunked Steele dossier before using it to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on Trump’s former campaign adviser Carter Page.

This FISA warrant allowed the FBI to conduct surveillance activities on Page, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) ultimately ruled the two final FISA directives against Page were invalid — including one Comey authorized in 2017.

In a July interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, law professor and author Jonathan Turley questioned whether the remarks made by both Comey and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan in their testimonies amounted to perjury.

Turley said both men are “sophisticated players” who are “very careful in how they word” their testimonies. They claimed in their testimonies there was no “malicious intent” in including the Steele dossier in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), but that mistakes may have been made, Turley told Ingraham.

“Comey portrayed himself as ignorant of all these countervailing sources,” Turley concluded.

Brennan might find himself in the same boat as Comey, especially given whistleblower accusations alleging Brennan played a key role in pushing for the dossier’s inclusion in the ICA.

Trump’s FBI launched a criminal investigation into Brennan and Comey in July, DOJ sources told Fox Digital. Two sources told the outlet the FBI viewed Comey and Brennan’s interactions as a “conspiracy,” but did not reveal specific details of what is being investigated.

President of Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, told the Daily Caller in an interview that investigating a conspiracy could open the door to related crimes, including perjury and the deprivation of civil rights under color of law.

Perjury is relatively easy to indict over, but not necessarily easy to convict, according to Fitton.

Even if any officials are indicted, there are still hurdles that need to be cleared, namely the statute of limitations, Fitton told the Caller. The standard statute of limitations (or the maximum amount of time to start the legal process) is five years, but the beginning of the Russian interference investigations was nearly 10 years ago.

To bypass the statute of limitations — which is necessary for turning indictments into convictions -— the accusers must prove the involved parties were participating in a conspiracy, not just “a series of desperate acts that don’t have any link” potentially woven together by the opposition party in political animus, Fitton told the Caller.

Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper wrote a July 30 op-ed in the New York Times (NYT) in an attempt to set the record straight. They claimed the Steele dossier was not used as a source or accounted for in the ICA’s analysis or conclusions, acknowledging the dossier was largely discredited.

However, a press release published by ODNI that same day claimed accompanying records show “Clapper and other senior Obama administration officials privately denounced the Steele dossier, despite simultaneously ensuring that the January 2017 ICA included it.”

These documents, like some of the other records declassified by the IC, are based on the testimony of a single, unnamed whistleblower — which could prove difficult in demonstrating malicious intent beyond a reasonable doubt.

A separate anonymous career intelligence officer who worked with House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) Democrats told the FBI in 2017 that then-Democrat California Rep. Adam Schiff allegedly approved leaking classified information with the goal of indicting Trump, according to a memo released Monday.

Schiff’s Senate office previously told the Caller the accusation was a “baseless [smear]” and questioned the credibility of the whistleblower.

Former FBI Special Agent in Charge Jody Weis told NBC 15 on Tuesday that leaking information is a crime.

“Leaking information is a crime, no doubt about it,” Weis stated. “Leaking information with the intent to smear a president, with the intent to perhaps indict a president, that should terrify every American in this country, regardless of party.”

When the whistleblower’s accusation was initially brought before the DOJ, officials allegedly dismissed the allegation of the leaking, claiming, “congressmen have immunity to all speech and actions made on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives,” according to the FBI memos. The DOJ was referencing the Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause.

Former intelligence officials are not the only ones who may face indictments. The recently declassified documents from the John Durham 2023 Special Counsel report annex may open the door for criminal charges against Clinton campaign staff and other individuals in the Obama administration.

Information recently released to the public suggested former President Barack Obama planned to snuff out the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information and her use of a private email server. Simultaneously, the records revealed the FBI failed to investigate information alleging the Democratic Party was planning to connect Trump to the “Russian mafia.”

But challenges can still arise in obtaining convictions, even though analysts assessed the declassified emails were authentic, according to documents.

The plaintiff still needs to overcome the statute of limitations and would have to show the courts, beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant’s alleged actions met the high legal standard for criminal intent.

As the head of a public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, Fitton offered advice on how the Trump administration could overcome many of these hurdles, potentially obtaining indictments or even convictions.

Fitton told the Caller that by focusing their attention on the accusations of criminal activity in 2016, the administration is missing the “low-hanging fruit” of more recent corruption targets.

“To get at what happened in 2016 is gonna be very complicated; to get out what happened last year, that’s easy,” Fitton told the Caller. “There’s no statute of limitations, so you don’t have to weave in a grand conspiracy claim.”

Fitton gave examples of places the administration should focus its attention, including former Attorney General (AG) Merrick Garland’s unprosecuted referral for contempt and Comey’s Instagram post that Fitton claimed “basically threatened the president’s life.”

As for “Russiagate,” Fitton called for Trump to “appoint a special counsel that reports directly to him” to tackle the issue.

“The Justice Department is compromised because they’re going to have to investigate themselves in many of these issues, so is the FBI. So he’s got to have someone who’s free and clear of those bureaucracies, but with all the powers that come with the presidency and prosecuting cases, and that’s done through a presidential special counsel,” Fitton told the Caller.

“Because of the deep state actors that are still floating around … there has to be a more direct presidential intervention,” he added.

Derek VanBuskirk

Reporter

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

CIA Analysts Who Helped Cook Up Phony Russiagate Intel Still Thriving In Deep State, Former Spy Says

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Two analysts who helped Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan discredit President Donald Trump through weak or phony intelligence on Russian election interference continue to cash paychecks from the agency, according to a former CIA operations officer.

“At least two still do work there. That doesn’t mean that all of the other people have left. Those are just the two that I’m aware of,” former CIA Operations Officer Bryan Dean Wright told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

One of former authors remains in possession of a “blue badge,” meaning they remain a CIA employee, while another possesses a “green badge” and continues to do work for the agency as a contractor, Wright said. Others may retain their security clearances.

Wright has not held back his opinion about his former boss: He said in a recent op-ed that he should “rot in prison” for undermining the integrity of the Republic.

“These men thought they knew what was best for America, and they didn’t give a damn what voters like you thought,” he wrote.

Brennan — whose tenure at CIA spanned decades — likely cultivated generations of like-minded CIA employees, Wright said. The former CIA director’s influence probably continues to shape the agency’s culture by way of mentorships, friendships, promotion panels and hiring offices. 

The CIA did not respond to requests for comment. A request for comment from Brennan through his consulting firm WestExec Advisors did not receive a reply.

Documents declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in recent days have revealed that President Barack Obama’s intelligence chiefs spun, cherrypicked and in some cases wholly manufactured raw intelligence reports to support the narrative — predetermined in leaks to the media — that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a “clear preference” for Trump and “aspired to help his election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.”

The resulting 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment touched off years of Russiagate media frenzy. Though technically endorsed by the “big three” — the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency — just five CIA analysts under Brennan wrote the assessment, according to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report declassified on July 23. The analysts were plucked from a “Fusion Cell” Brennan had formed months earlier to examine Russian election interference, according to a CIA self-assessment declassified on July 2.

Those analysts worked hand-in-glove with Brennan, churning out an assessment in less than a week in the days leading up to Christmas. Brennan hid the “sensitive intelligence” — the unverified, slanted and irrelevant raw intelligence reports — from other elements of the intelligence community until a two-day review process. The review happened using a card copy that was shuttled between Langley, Washington, DC, and Fort Meade, the report indicates.

Despite the revelations, there have been few assurances that analysts whose names are unknown and may remain embedded in the Deep State no longer play a role in U.S. national security.

It’s not atypical for the CIA to conduct internal investigations of its personnel, from audits of timecards to counterintelligence probes to ensure foreign spies do not infiltrate U.S. intelligence, Wright said.

Yet the CIA assessment of its own “tradecraft” in assembling the ICA omitted full details about the significant flaws of the raw intelligence reports underlying its judgements. The deputy director of CIA for analysis, who is unnamed in the report, wrote that CIA analysts were subject to “procedural anomalies” and Brennan’s outsized influence. The CIA assessment also concedes its ICA was weakened by the inclusion of the Steele dossier, a salacious Democratic opposition research file on Trump. Yet the report also claims the ICA had “analytic rigor” which “exceeded that of most IC assessments.”

The report conceded that the CIA’s “high confidence” that Russian authorities “aspired” for Trump to win was unwarranted given it was based in only one report. But the CIA’s self-assessment did not give full insight into the weaknesses of that report.

“While the DA Review identified specific procedural and tradecraft issues with the one judgment, these issues should not be interpreted as indicative of broader systemic problems in the IC’s analytic processes or standards,” the CIA deputy director wrote.

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford proclaimed the report a “whitewash” within hours of its release, setting in motion the declassification of his committee’s more strident report.

“The report was produced in the 116th Congress under Devin Nunes despite extraordinary restrictions placed by the CIA. Among those restrictions are a prohibition on transporting the document to secure spaces on Capitol Hill,” Crawford said.

It would only become apparent when the congressional investigation’s report was declassified three weeks later that the “aspired” judgement relied on a fragment of a sentence from a single human intelligence report.

“Putin had made this decision [to leak the DNC emails] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [candidate Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory,” the report read.

The “aspired” judgement hinged on the clause “whose victory Putin was counting on,” which five CIA officers interpreted five different ways, the report states.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe himself called attention to a lack of accountability around intelligence failures and deceptions in a 2023 op-ed. CIA senior bureaucrats hold lifetime appointments, maintaining their rank and pay even when overseeing major failures — a practice Congress should move to end, Ratcliffe wrote.

“Officials who betray the public trust—either by bad acts in office or by politicizing their credentials after leaving—should be stripped of their security clearances,” Ratcliffe wrote.

But experts told the DCNF that Ratcliffe could encounter a hostile CIA culture in implementing any reforms.

CIA officer training includes a video of drafters of an intelligence estimate alleging Iraqi weapons of mass destruction expressing regret, according to Wright. Few analysts would want to see themselves as responsible for an intelligence failure that could set back their careers.

At the same time, a lack of accountability could contribute to a culture of stagnation and decline in professionalism in Langley.

“The CIA has become so severely politicized that it has fundamentally lowered its standards of integrity in collecting and assessing intelligence, and analysts come up with what are often very weak intelligence assessments,” said J. Michael Waller, senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy. “I used to think it was grossly irresponsible hyperbole to compare the CIA to the KGB, but you really have to wonder, have the CIA and other intelligence community elements become a state within a state?”

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

AUTHOR

Emily Kopp

Investigative Reporter

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Social Media Posts Reveal Anti-Trump Bias Of CIA Officer Who Helped Create 2016 Russiagate Report

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A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterintelligence officer who claimed she helped lead the 2016 U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) regarding allegations of Russian election interference has a history of social media comments blasting President Donald Trump as a “dictator.”

The comments from recently-retired CIA officer, Susan Miller, were originally reported by Just The News Tuesday and verified by the Daily Caller. Miller claimed she assisted in spearheading the 2016 ICA investigative team. The CIA under Director John Ratcliffe released a tradecraft review of the ICA in 2025.

Responding to a May New York Times (NYT) article, Miller commented that the reported dismantling of an investigative squad in the FBI was “awful” and “Further proof that Trump is a dictator,” according to her LinkedIn post.

Miller also responded on LinkedIn to a March Washington Post article as “proof” of Trump’s “lack of empathy ….. and his high regard for a dictator,” adding that Trump has “dictator envy.”

Additionally, she agreed with a comment that appeared to compare Trump to Hitler, saying, “the Hitler analogy is not lost on a bunch of us” on LinkedIn.

Miller also said that “MaGa types are nazis” in a response to an article about the firing of the CIA’s top doctor Terry Adirim. The article referenced a lawsuit that alleged a “political extremist…called for the termination of [Adirim’s] employment and even her death.”

“Good grief. As if we needed proof that MaGa types are nazis ….. calling for her death??! So wrong. I hope she is okay,” Miller wrote.

She also agreed with a post calling Trump and Elon Musk “unAmerican and unpatriotic” for their “cruelty and sadistic pleasure,” apparently in regard to the administration firing federal workers.

Even in a comment where she agreed with an action of Trump’s, Miller clarified she was not a “Trump fan” and has previously referred to Trump as “our Dear Leader,” claiming that he wants to “rule … the world.”

In a recent interview with Times Radio, Miller claimed Trump harassed her team for investigating allegations of Russia influencing the election in his favor. “Trump wants to be very much like Putin, sort of a president for life,” she told the outlet.

In a statement to Just The News, Miller claimed she initially supported the president.

“I was originally pro Trump and a solid Republican since I could start voting….i even voted for him in his first election. Your comments are mean spirited and uninformed.. Our constitution limits the president to two terms, Trump is already talking about a third. I refused to put the dossier in our report as it could not be corroborated. Sorry to ruin your view of me as a left wing Republican hater. I was overseas for a tour from 19-22. I k ow [sic] nothing about the laptop letter, but will look it up.”

In a July podcast with “SpyTalk,” Miller said her team came into the investigation with a “completely open mind” as “that’s what you do in counterintelligence, you just tell the truth of what you find.”

Miller asserted she purposefully sought out personnel who would challenge her perspective.

She claimed her team found evidence that Russia preferred a Trump presidency in 2016, but they did not have evidence Trump knowingly cooperated with the Kremlin. Miller told “SpyTalk” her team added the unverified Steele Dossier to the final report because the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would not approve the final report without the dossier’s inclusion.

Miller was upset and said she did not have time to verify the dossier’s claims before the report was published. She said the dossier could be true because she has not verified or discounted the sources in the dossier.

“Maybe it was real,” she said.

When asked by Times Radio if she has seen any evidence that Trump is a Kremlin asset, Miller said, “I have seen some things… I’m still working out whether or not it is true,” adding that there is some information that “makes it look like he could be.”

AUTHOR

Derek VanBuskirk

Reporter

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is repblished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Lies, damned lies and the Steele dossier

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The truth always comes out eventually.

Last week, Russian-born analyst Igor Danchenko, who lives in Washington DC, was arrested for making false statements to the FBI. While this may sound like another innocuous headline in these days of deceit, Danchenko’s arrest is the latest chapter in a breathtaking political scandal that renders Watergate child’s play.

All the way back in January 2017, BuzzFeedNews broke a bombshell story titled, “These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia”. It was the first time the public gained access to the now infamous “Steele dossier” — a 35-page intelligence report alleging that Trump planned his rise to presidential power with secret interference from Russia.

A media feeding frenzy began. For the next two years, America’s corporate press gave unending airtime to the Trump-Russia collusion story. It rose above every cheap shot about Trump’s diet, small hands or latest mean tweet to become the principal proof that Trump was an imposter: an illegitimate president and an existential threat to the global order.

It wasn’t just America’s national media that ran with the narrative. It quickly became a worldwide sensation. Australian taxpayers funded and endured thousands of articles on the ABC website, including a Four Corners special that claimed, “It’s the story of the century: The US President and his connections to Russia.”

The New York Times and the Washington Post were jointly decorated with the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting on the story. Still today, the Pullitzer Prize website recounts of their heroic feats:

For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.

There was only one problem: the Steele dossier was almost entirely fictional. Danchenko was the “source” for many of its false claims — and justice finally caught up with him last week.

That the dossier was bunk was already known. The two-year, US$32 million Mueller Report that probed the dossier and other sources found no evidence that Trump had colluded with Russia, even if the Kremlin did interfere in the election for its own ends.

By the time the Mueller Report was released, the damage to Trump’s reputation had already been done. But this was only the beginning of the scandal’s unravelling.

During Trump’s first year in office, it came to light that the Steele dossier had actually been funded by Trump’s rivals. The year previous, its author — former British spy Christopher Steele — had been paid to produce the bunk document by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Both Clinton and the DNC lied about their role in the scandal until it could be lied about no longer.

Other sinister events were taking place behind the scenes. The Obama-era FBI launched “Crossfire Hurricane”, a secret investigation giving the FBI powers to spy on Donald Trump’s election campaign.

In an exposé, the editorial board of the New York Post noted that “the Obama-Comey FBI and Justice Department never had anything more substantial than the laughable fiction of the Steele dossier to justify the “counterintelligence” investigation of the Trump campaign.” They continued:

President Barack Obama, in his final days in office, played a key role in fanning the flames of the phony scandal. Fully briefed on the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, he knew the FBI had come up with nothing despite months of work starting in July 2016.   

Indeed, the Obama administration went on a full-scale leak offensive — handing the Washington Post, New York Times and others a nonstop torrent of “anonymous” allegations of Trumpite ties to Moscow. It suggested that the investigations were finding a ton of treasonous dirt on Team Trump — when in fact the investigators had come up dry.

The dishonesty ran deep. Subsequent investigations revealed that an FBI lawyer deceptively altered an email which was then used to persuade a federal judge to extend a surveillance warrant, allowing the spying on Trump’s campaign to continue. The shady lawyer avoided jail time, apparently because that’s how things are done these days in DC.

We often think of postmodernism in its impact on literature, the arts and popular culture. But the link between postmodernism and politics couldn’t be more apparent than in the Steele dossier saga. To borrow the words of postmodernism’s precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?

America’s intelligence agencies were weaponised against innocent civilians for partisan political gain. Reputations and careers are in tatters. The global media has been willingly used in a relentless assault on truth and common sense. And now that the truth comes out, the guilty are silent.

Destroy a culture’s meta-narrative and you end up with any narrative at all.

Be careful, little ears, what you hear.

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg.

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.