Independent journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag published an article on Substack site Public last week that, if true, would prove the hoax of the century. Of course, the story was greeted with a shrug by the legacy media.
The trio reported that “multiple credible sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence investigation” had informed them that “the U.S. Intelligence Community, including the Central Intelligence Agency, illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies to target Trump advisors long before the summer of 2016.”
The scheme was allegedly directed by then-CIA Director John Brennan. The sources claimed that Brennan “asked the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance [the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand] to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies.”
The sources said that Brennan had “identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to ‘bump,’” which means “to make contact with or manipulate.” These individuals, the authors wrote, became “targets for collection and misinformation.”
Moreover, details and raw intelligence related to this operation are contained in a 10-inch binder that Trump ordered to be declassified in the final days of his presidency, according to the sources. The whereabouts of this binder is unclear.
The article states that, “If the top-secret documents exist proving these charges, they are potentially proof that multiple U.S. intelligence officials broke laws against spying and election interference.”
Although hearing about the story from sources close to the House investigation is new, the reality is that investigative reporter and podcast host Dan Bongino, along with a handful of others, reported it years ago. But the very idea that former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Brennan, whom Bongino believes were the masterminds of the hoax, would go to such extraordinary lengths to derail then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign was so unfathomable that most people dismissed it as a far-right conspiracy theory.
I watched Bongino’s podcast faithfully, and day after day, Bongino would connect a few more dots. Eventually, he immortalized his conclusions in two books, “Spygate” and “Follow the Money,” published in 2018 and 2020, respectively. In the latter, he wrote: “In 2015, more than a year before Brennan left the CIA to become the most unhinged never-Trumper of the Obama administration, his agency was receiving intelligence about figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents.”
Bongino detailed his years-long quest for the truth in an emotional podcast on Wednesday. He described Brennan as “the tactical ringmaster, the battlefield general that Obama gave the orders to. “Take down Donald Trump and make him look like a foreign agent. Do you understand?’”
He referred to the scheme as an information laundering operation. The CIA fed information from 20–30 different sources down different “pipes,” knowing it would find its way to the FBI, who would then open up a case, he said.
Who were the pipes? One was then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Bongino cited a July 2018 news release from government watchdog Judicial Watch, who was suing the CIA to obtain documents related to a dossier leak to Reid. According to the release, Reid reportedly believed “Brennan was feeding him information about alleged links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in order to make public accusations.”
It went on to say: “According to ‘Russian Roulette,’ by Yahoo! News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff and David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of the Left-wing Mother Jones magazine, Brennan contacted Reid on Aug. 25, 2016, to brief him on the state of Russia’s interference in the presidential campaign. Brennan briefed other members of the so-called Gang of Eight, but Reid is the only [one] who took direct action.”
Another pipe was the Clinton campaign. Numerous media appearances by campaign manager Robbie Mook and then-Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan, who is now President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, helped to trumpet the disinformation.
Sidney Blumenthal, better known as “Sid Vicious,” a former journalist with a lot of connections in the media, was part of the plot as well.
Glenn Simpson, a co-founder of research firm Fusion GPS, was another. Clinton and the Democratic National Committee ostensibly paid the firm to gather information on Russian collusion. Their real motive, Bongino said, was to use Simpson as a “patsy, a fall guy, because the CIA was spying on him too. … The CIA would send people to Fusion GPS to give them false information to follow up on. … Then, they would listen in on Fusion GPS as they were talking about the disinformation from the people that they [the CIA] hired.” It was a great, big information laundering scheme.
The Department of Justice was also involved. Simpson hired Nellie Ohr as a researcher for the Clinton project. She was married to then-high ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr. You may recall reading about Nellie Ohr’s “Hi Honey” emails to her husband.
The FBI claimed they opened Crossfire Hurricane after learning over drinks at a London bar that a junior Trump campaign adviser told an Australian diplomat the Russians had damning information about Hillary Clinton, an explanation that never quite passed the smell test.
As Bongino sees it, the CIA’s ultimate goal was to feed enough lies to the FBI through their designated “pipes” to trigger an investigation into Donald Trump. And if Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutenberg’s sources are correct, they used foreign sources to do it.
All I can say is that, in his wildest dreams, Brennan couldn’t have imagined how successful his plot would be.
A previous version of this article appeared in the Washington Examiner.
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John Brennan has been betraying this country since he cast his vote for Gust Hall.
Everything detailed in this reporting is highly illegal, if true. Our Fake News media played a knowingly big roll in this, thus their collective, underwhelming yawn of surprise. Of course, no one will go to jail over this, unfortunately. That’s how a banana republic works.