U.S. intelligence officials say newly declassified CIA referral on Russian intercept just one of several red flares spies sent the FBI on Russia collusion narrative.
Scott Eisen/Getty Images By John Solomon Updated: October 6, 2020 - 11:16pm Article Dig In The latest declassification from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe is already being distorted by election politics. Republicans are trumpeting it as a smoking gun, while Democrats are dismissing it as Russian disinformation.
In fact, it is neither, according to a half dozen current and former U.S. intelligence officials who know the real story.
The CIA decision to alert the FBI in September 2016 that there was intelligence showing the Russians believed Hillary Clinton was "stirring up" a false collusion narrative to "vilify" Donald Trump was sent as a red flare, one of several warnings that the bureau had embarked on a fool's errand that could become a source of acute institutional embarrassment.
Between July 2016 and May 2017, the CIA repeatedly warned the FBI that the Russia collusion narrative spun by Christopher Steele's dossier was a combination of political dirty trick by Team Clinton and targeted Russian disinformation.
In rapid succession, the CIA alerted the Crossfire Hurricane team that Russia knew by July 2016 that Clinton had a research operation led by Steele, and by fall 2016 had fed Steele disinformation and that Steele's dossier contained demonstrably false information, according to declassified footnotes from a Justice Department inspector general's investigation.
Likewise, America's premier spy agency also warned America's premier law enforcement agency it was focused on the wrong guy in Trump adviser Carter Page. CIA told FBI that Page was a U.S. intelligence asset, not a Russian stooge.
The FBI hid that crucial information from the FISA Court, in one instance even falsifying a document.
And yet the FBI proceeded to sustain an investigation into Trump-Russia collusion that lacked any evidence to justify its existence, the officials told Just the News. In the process, agents secured a year's worth of surveillance targeting Page and the Trump inner circle that yielded no proof of collusion.
"We had solid evidence Russia was trying to meddle in the election, and we had equally solid evidence the Trump collusion angle was nothing more than a Clinton deflection effort that the Russians picked up on and fed," a senior U.S. intelligence official explained. "Two dirty tricks amplifying each other."
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