While Washington security establishment was busy chasing Russia collusion hoax, Putin invaded Ukraine

One of the key things that jumped out at me reading the 316-page Durham Report is the obsession with which the Washington security establishment was trying to prove the non-existent Trump-Russia "collusion," a dubious theory that has kept America unsettled for more than half a decade. Having served at the Defense Intelligence Agency as a top senior intelligence analyst on the Russia-Putin target for eight years, I can state with near certainty that this obsession of the bureaucracy has made America less safe, leaving us exposed to the real Russia threat and costing the U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars. 

The Durham Report exposed an unprecedented level of corruption among key Obama-Biden security officials. FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, foreign policy adviser for the Clinton campaign and current White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and many others repeatedly publicly pushed the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. 

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Behind closed doors, however, in classified testimonies before the House Intelligence Committee, they admitted having no "empirical evidence" of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. 

The establishment’s preoccupation with getting former President Trump through the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, for which there was no justification, as special counsel Durham concluded, very likely resulted in the misjudgment of the actual Russian threat. 

The Russia collusion scandal was masterminded by the Washington security apparatus on a massive scale. This could only be done by realigning the intelligence resources assigned to the Russia target - away from collecting and analyzing secrets that are critical to understanding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mindset and detecting his regime’s plans and intentions, such as the invasion of Ukraine. 

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The focus would have moved toward the labor-intensive task of sifting raw intelligence to find something that substantiates the top management’s agenda of proving the "collusion" hoax. The bureaucracy’s typical reaction to any new priority du jour, coming from the top, is an immediate creation of an interagency taskforce, "tiger team," crisis response squad, and the like. Throughout my intelligence career, I participated in several. It takes an analyst who is a subject-matter expert on a particular target away from his or her account, often leaving a gap in intelligence collection and analysis.

Between July 31, 2016, when the FBI launched Cross Hurricane, and through the years of Donald Trump’s presidency, a frequent question analysts were asked by their seniors was "What does Putin have on Trump?" What they should’ve been asking is questions about Putin’s state of mind and Russia’s cyber weapons, space warfare, nuclear doctrine, and the like.

It is likely that such misuse and misalignment of analytic resources to prioritize the sham investigation eroded our intelligence posture on Russia. In addition, both the Mueller and the Durham probes - while they turned out to be necessary and useful - placed a significant burden on analytic and investigative cadre. 

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As part of the Durham probe alone, hundreds of individuals were interviewed, in classified settings, at government agencies, businesses, telephone companies, political campaigns and other entities, both domestically and overseas. 

The Durham Report states that "as of April 2023 . . . the Office has conducted more than 480 interviews; obtained and reviewed more than one million documents consisting of more than six million pages." Seven years’ worth of investigations undoubtedly strained the intelligence community’s Russia-Putin resources, likely causing the security bureaucracy to miss the signposts of Russia’s preparation for war on Ukraine. 

Consequently, no strategy to deter Putin was developed, leaving the Pentagon with only one tool in the toolbox – high-tech, high-priced weaponry, some of which the U.S. urgently needs for itself, that Team Biden has been throwing at Ukraine. That Biden is demanding Americans funnel military aid to Ukraine "indefinitely" only proves that Washington is now engaged in fighting another endless war - this time a proxy one with Moscow. And, as usual, the bureaucracy is having Americans pay for it.

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The high-profile Mueller and Durham investigations carried the price tags of $32 million and $6.5 million respectively, a justified investment given that they debunked the "collusion" hoax, putting to rest the saga that has polarized American society for years. But the nearly $200 billion in promised or already sent aid to Ukraine, and counting - all because those entrusted with detecting and neutralizing foreign threats to America failed to do their jobs – is a dangerous precedent. It encourages the bureaucracy to continue using ordinary Americans as a cash cow, rather than figure out smart ways of keeping our enemies at bay. 

As Special Counsel John Durham prepares to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee about his report on June 21st, the Justice Department must make it clear that those who in 2016 weaponized the administrative state’s spying and police bureaucracy against a political opponent they didn’t like will be held to account. Because if these apparatchiks are not punished, they will repeat their subversive playbook again in 2024. 

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