Gregg Jarrett: Trump Russia Hoax fallout — what happens now that FBI lies have been exposed

The number of FBI lies keeps piling up as the bureau’s sedulous cover-up of the Russia hoax continues to unravel. There is now a mountain of evidence that the agency was riven with corruption during James Comey’s scandal-plagued tenure. Abuse of power there was so endemic that it persisted unabated by Comey's successor, Christopher Wray, who assumed leadership in August 2017.

The latest document declassified on Sunday proves that the FBI actively deceived the Senate Intelligence Committee when it briefed members in 2018 about its Trump-Russia collusion investigation. The bureau assured senators that the infamous dossier was credible and that its author, ex-British spy Christopher Steele, was reliable. The FBI said there was no reason to doubt Steele’s primary subsource.

None of it was true, and the FBI well knew it. Indeed, the agency had discredited both Steele and his notorious anti-Trump memos more than a year earlier in January of 2017. Yet, the FBI concealed this information from the senate committee and advised members that the exact opposite was true – that the contents of the dossier were accurate and verified. It was all a deviously devised fraud.

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Whoever at the FBI made these false representations should be charged with perjury and conspiracy. As Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who released the smoking-gun document, said, “They misled the hell out of them (the committee).” That’s putting it mildly. The next step is for the names of the liars to be exposed. 

Let’s back up for a moment. It was the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee that commissioned and funded the phony dossier. Steele composed it in the summer of 2016 and spoon-fed it to the FBI, as well as select members of the gullible mainstream media. Journalists like David Corn and Michael Isikoff fell for it and published stories based on leaks from anonymous sources. They didn’t bother to determine whether the leaked information itself was correct. 

Soon, MSNBC and CNN were eagerly on board. The New York Times and the Washington Post became witting accessories by driving the fictive collusion narrative ad nauseam. They treated the dossier as scripture, never doubting its ludicrous allegations. Any responsible journalist would have known immediately that it was garbage intended to smear Trump. But few had the courage to say so. 

Much of the collusion case against Trump was built on the foundation of the many fabrications and inventions in the dossier. Four days after the new president was inaugurated, the FBI debunked it by interviewing Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, a former researcher/analyst for the far-left Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Danchenko readily confessed to agents that he “felt like he had to report something back to Steele” to justify the monthly salary he was receiving. So, he peddled gossip, rumor, innuendo and speculation from “random associates” and his drinking buddies to keep the paychecks coming. The main accusations were untrue – Danchenko said so. Imagine the look on the faces of the FBI agents as they learned that it was all a fairy tale.

But Comey and his confederates, deputy director Andrew McCabe and counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, saw to it that the evidence of Trump’s innocence gleaned from Danchenko was buried somewhere in the bowels of the J. Edgar Hoover building. They sealed it off in the tomb of unknown “classified documents.”

It would still be there, were it not for a change in leadership at two important executive branch departments. You see… the FBI never anticipated that William Barr would be appointed Attorney General and John Ratcliffe would take over as Director of National Intelligence. These two men cracked the tomb wide open and have been declassifying all of the evidence of the FBI’s malfeasance ever since. 

The FBI wove a tangled web of deceit. U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is nearing the end of his criminal investigation, is tasked with straightening it out. Indictments should follow.

Those who defrauded the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to gain warrant applications to spy on former Trump campaign associate Carter Page must be held accountable under the law. Those who deceived the Senate Intelligence Committee must also be held to account. They represent two sets of crimes that arose from the same pernicious lie about the dossier.

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There was never any credible evidence that Trump was a Russian asset who colluded with Moscow. There were no seditious acts that he cooked up with the Kremlin. The FBI knew that it was a damning fiction that constitutes what is surely the dirtiest political trick ever perpetrated in politics.

The FBI and others deployed despicable tactics to destroy Trump’s presidency, undo his election and drive him from office. His enemies, blinded by their own political bias and personal hatred of Trump, pursued him with a vengeance.

As I have argued before, the greatest peril to democracy today is not a foreign force but a malignant force of unelected officials here at home. Armed with immense power and often lurking in the shadows, they have revealed themselves capable of uncommon corruption.

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Their allegiance is not to the Constitution and the rule of law but to themselves. Personal animus and a voracious appetite for authority are what motivates their zeal. They have politicized their agencies, weaponized law enforcement and persecuted people without respect for law or process.

It is time for the Durham probe to end, and the prosecutions to begin. 

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