OBAMA TEAM’S 2-FACED RUSSIA PROBE
Convicting Don in public, not under oath
Newly released House Intelligence Committee transcripts show just how different a picture some top Obama-era officials painted of the Trump-Russia investigation under oath compared to the loaded allegations they made over the years in public statements.
JAMES CLAPPER
The former director of national intelligence, who has emerged as a staunch President Trump critic and paid-CNN contributor since leaving his government role, told the committee during a July 2017 interview that he “never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting [or] conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
“That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence . . . [redacted],” Clapper continued, “But I do not recall any instance when I had direct evidence of the content of these meetings. It’s just the frequency and prevalence of them was of concern.”
But just two months prior to his sworn testimony, Clapper told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that his “dashboard warning light was clearly on,” regarding potential communications between Russians and Trump White House senior adviser Jared Kushner.
“I have to say that, without specifically affirming or confirming these conversations — since, even though they’re in the public realm, they’re still classified — just from a theoretical standpoint, I will tell you that my dashboard warning light was clearly on and I think that was the case with all of us in the intelligence community, very concerned about the nature of these approaches to the Russians,” Clapper said at the time.
One month later, Clapper stated that the Russia investigation had surpassed that of Watergate.
“I think if you compare the two that Watergate pales, really, in my view, compared to what we’re confronting now,” Clapper told reporters during a trip to Australia.
And in December 2017, Clapper said on CNN that Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official, is a “great case officer,” continuing, “he knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president.”
As recently as 2019, Clapper alleged “it was a possibility” that the commander in chief was a “Russian asset” — “whether witting or unwitting.”
ANDREW McCABE
The former deputy director of the FBI and current CNN contributor, became a very public foe of the president after he was fired in March 2018.
In a “60 Minutes” interview on Feb. 17, 2019, McCabe recalled a meeting with Trump in the early days of the administration, saying, “I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency, and won the election for the presidency, and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage and that was something that troubled me greatly.”
But as an FBI official, McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee that investigators had not been able to verify claims made in the Steele dossier, the unverified reporting that claimed Trump was compromised by Russia, ultimately forming the basis for investigations of the matter.
“What is the most damning or important piece of evidence in the dossier that you now know is true?” McCabe was asked during his December 2017 interview.
“Well, as I tried to explain before, there is a lot of information in the Steele reporting. We have not been able to prove the accuracy of all the information,” he answered.
Pressed further to confirm that he did not know if Christopher Steele’s dossier was true, McCabe said, “That’s correct.”
BEN RHODES
An Obama-era deputy national security adviser and harsh Trump critic, Rhodes tweeted in July 2019 after Robert Mueller’s public testimony to Congress: “Russia attacked our democracy. Trump campaign sought its help, had many contacts with Russians, lied about it and obstructed the investigation into it. Several senior Trump associates were convicted of crimes. Trump would have been indicted if he wasn’t President. Not complicated.”
But when asked under oath by House investigators if he had any evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, Rhodes said he did not.
“I wouldn’t have received any information on any criminal or counterintelligence investigations into what the Trump campaign was doing . . . I saw indications of potential coordination, but I did not see, you know, the specific evidence of the actions of the Trump campaign,” he said.
SAMANTHA POWER
The onetime US ambassador to the United Nations has publicly accused the president of catering to Putin, allegedly to “compensate” him for interfering in the 2016 election.
“Every day @realDonaldTrump finds new ways to compensate Vladimir Putin for his election interference. And every day Putin gains additional incentive to interfere again on Trump’s behalf in 2020,” she alleged on Twitter last November.
But when speaking under oath to House investigators and asked whether she had seen evidence of Russian interference, she said, “I am not in possession of anything — I am not in possession and didn’t read or absorb information that came from out of the intelligence community.”
SUSAN RICE
President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser told ABC’s “This Week” in July 2018 that questioning if Trump was compromised by the Russians was “legitimate” because Putin was benefitting by his decisions.
“What his motivations are, I think, is a legitimate question . . . the policies that this president has pursued globally have served Vladimir Putin’s interests,” she charged at the time.
Less than a year earlier, Rice told House investigators that she hadn’t seen evidence proving Trump coordinated or colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
“I don’t recall intelligence that I would consider evidence to that effect that I saw prior . . . to my departure,” she testified.
RussiaGate is now a complete dead letter — but ObamaGate is taking its place. Just how far did the then-president go to cripple his successor? It’s now clear 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. Yet incessant leaks from that supposedly confidential probe wound up consuming the Trump administration’s first months in office — followed by the Bob Mueller-led special-counsel investigation that proved nearly the “total witch hunt” that President Trump dubbed it.
Information released as the Justice Department dropped its charges against Gen. Mike Flynn shows that President Barack Obama, in his final days in office, played a key role in fanning the flames of 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.
Yet on Jan. 5, 2017, Obama told top officials who’d be staying on in the new administration to keep the crucial facts from Team Trump.
It happened at an Oval Office meeting with Vice President Joe Biden, intel chiefs John Brennan and Jim Clapper and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, as well as FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.
“From a national-security perspective,” Rice’s memo afterward put it, “President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”
This, even as then-President Obama also directed that as many people as possible across his administration be briefed on the (utterly unsubstantiated) allegations against Team Trump — and as Rice and others took unprecedented steps to “unmask” US citizens like Flynn whose conversations had been caught on federal wiretaps of foreigners.
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.
Sadly, Comey’s FBI played along — sandbagging Flynn with the “friendly” interview that later became the pretext for the bogus charges dropped last week, as well as triggering the White House chaos that led to his ouster. This, when the FBI had already gone over the general with a finetooth comb, and concluded that, no, he’d done nothing like collude with the Russians.
Meanwhile, Comey himself gave Trump an intentionally misleading briefing on the Steele dossier. That was followed by leaks that suggested the dossier was the tip of an iceberg, rather than a pack of innuendo that hadn’t at all checked out under FBI scrutiny.
Pulitzer Prizes were won for blaring utter fiction; the Trump administration was kneecapped out of the gate. Innocents like Flynn were bankrupted along the way.
Say this about Obama: He knows how to play dirty.