Are The Latest Spygate Revelations A Big Fat Misdirection?

The Russiagate revelations have been coming fast and furious again. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen two major disclosures, each a bombshell. Even so, they also are less important than what we still don’t know.

First came the long-awaited release of the “Trump-Russia binder,” a trove of intelligence documents that was supposed to have been released on Donald Trump’s last day at the White House in January 2021. The “binder” filled in crucial gaps about the Hillary Clinton campaign’s dirty tricks operation.

Among other things, it detailed how Christopher Steele knowingly lied to the FBI and how the Alfa Bank hoax — one of the most absurd allegations of secret Trump-Putin communications — was laundered through official channels. The binder was provided to The Federalist, which made it publicly available.

Then came an even more stunning release from Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office: an internal FBI report confirming that Nellie Ohr — a Clinton-linked operative and the wife of senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr — had lied to Congress. The report also detailed her central role in fusing campaign-generated disinformation with federal law enforcement.

But the real shock wasn’t Ohr’s role. It was the revelation of what might be the FBI’s most corrupt mechanism yet: a black-hole filing system for anything that undermined the Trump-Russia collusion narrative or vindicated Trump and his allies.

This system goes beyond classified documents or restricted access. According to the FBI agent who authored the report exposing Ohr’s lies to Congress, evidence filed into these “prohibited files” doesn’t just get hidden — it gets ghosted. If you search for a keyword, the result will be a false negative, i.e. not a notification indicating insufficient clearance, but a false portrayal that no related records exist.

For Congress, open-records requesters, or even internal investigators, it means total invisibility. Countless people caught up in the Robert Mueller investigation may have had important evidence buried in these black-hole files. At least one Mueller case remains ongoing to this day, an outrageous injustice.

When these black-hole files swallowed exculpatory evidence from the Mueller investigation or incriminating evidence of Ohr’s crimes, it wasn’t just a lapse or oversight. It was a criminal and systemic sabotage of justice.

What Happened After 2016 Is Likely Even Worse

As damning as these recent disclosures are, they still focus almost entirely on what we might call the 2016 phase of the Russiagate operation: the Clinton campaign’s smear tactics, the Steele dossier, the Alfa Bank hoax, and the Carter Page surveillance warrant. That’s bad enough itself, but it was originally aimed at sabotaging Trump’s campaign, not his presidency.

What continues to go largely untouched is what happened after Trump won. That is the 2017 phase of Russiagate, the direct weaponization of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement to paralyze and ultimately try to remove a sitting president. It was this phase, not the original dirty tricks, that transformed the hoax into a national crisis. And this phase remains almost completely obscured from public view.

After Trump won in November 2016, President Barack Obama immediately ordered the intelligence community to produce a report on Russian election interference. On December 9, 2016, the Washington Post announced the formation of a group to begin that assessment. In a move that defies explanation, the WaPo story was stealth edited later the same day — with no note or correction — to announce not the start of the assessment, but its conclusion: Vladimir Putin had helped Trump win.

The final Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was released in early January 2017. It was a farce, built on laughably threadbare claims such as Russia Today airing negative stories about Clinton. This was passed off as grounds to delegitimize an incoming president.

While a classified version was said to contain more compelling evidence, no such material has ever been made public — because it doesn’t exist. If it did, we would have seen it years ago. In fact, there is a classified version solely so intelligence agencies and corporate media can endlessly insist that’s where the “real” evidence is, without ever having to produce any.

Using Intelligence Agencies for Political Assassination

What’s worse, we know that before Obama ordered the ICA, he had already been briefed by the Central Intelligence Agency on the true nature of the Trump-Russia narrative. In July 2016, CIA Director John Brennan told him the whole story started as a Clinton campaign scheme. The evidence came from intercepted communications and reportedly involved Jake Sullivan, who later became Biden’s national security advisor. Did Obama stop the smear? Of course not. Instead, he and Brennan weaponized it.

The ICA was just the beginning. On January 5, 2017, Obama held a meeting in the Oval Office that included Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Sally Yates, and James Comey. The official topic was supposedly the ICA, but the real agenda appears to have been how to further sabotage the incoming Trump administration.

One specific item was how to target incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, with Biden suggesting the Logan Act and Comey soon targeting Flynn in an entrapment scheme. Rice later infamously emailed herself a CYA note claiming Obama had insisted everything be done “by the book.”

The following day, Comey “briefed” President-elect Trump on the Steele dossier in a move clearly intended to create a media hook. CNN’s Jake Tapper quickly ran the story, citing unnamed sources, although the timing and details made clear its origin. What is not widely recognized is that, until Tapper’s report, the media had largely avoided covering the dossier. After the Tapper story broke, the floodgates opened.

Escalating to the Highest Levels

While the media was flooded with dossier stories, the campaign to remove Flynn swiftly achieved its intended result. The Trump administration was kneecapped from the very beginning. Flynn was removed on false pretenses — he never lied, as alleged, and Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump had tasked with reviewing the transcript, either failed to notice or failed to acknowledge that it contained no lies.

On February 14, 2017, the day after Flynn’s removal, The New York Times published a hugely influential article claiming Trump campaign officials had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence. Figures in intelligence or Obama’s inner circle had clearly fed the story to the Times, timed for maximum impact in the wake of Flynn’s ouster.

The problem was, the story was a fabrication. Even Peter Strzok, who played a central role in the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, privately noted at the time that the article was false. His notes, released later, were blunt: “This statement is misleading and inaccurate as written,” he wrote of the passage. “We have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with IOs [intelligence officers].”

This episode captures the deeper point. The anti-Trump operation had escalated from a smear campaign driven by the Clinton campaign and partisans like Strzok to a coordinated assault involving the highest levels of government. By the time The New York Times ran its false story, the operation had moved far above Strzok’s pay grade.

Distracting the Public with Lower-Level Operatives

Comey, however, remained very much in the loop. In another calculated move, he and his cohorts forced Jeff Sessions to recuse himself under false pretenses, removing one of Trump’s last lines of defense against the weaponized machinery of government.

On March 20, 2017, Comey briefed Congress that the FBI was investigating Trump-Russia collusion. This violated FBI norms about discussing ongoing matters, but he claimed he had approval, which appears to have been part of the scheme.

The true scandal of Russiagate lies not in the original smear, but in the state-sponsored campaign that followed — one designed to cripple and ultimately topple a sitting presidency. It was a coordinated political operation carried out under the color of government authority.

Yet nearly everything we’ve been told about Russiagate — whether from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Special Counsel John Durham, Grassley, or the “binder” — centers on the earlier stage. The focus on the campaign-phase dirty tricks is not just narrow, it may be deliberate. It keeps the scandal safely contained to Clinton operatives and rogue FBI agents, while shielding the far more dangerous truth — that Obama and the CIA played a direct role in a domestic political conspiracy against a sitting president.

Revelations Designed to Distract

The truth is, we’ve only seen a sliver of the real record. Aside from a single paragraph revealing that Obama was briefed in July 2016 that the Russia collusion story was a Clinton campaign fabrication, virtually nothing has emerged from the CIA. The full, unredacted notes from that Oval Office meeting remain hidden.

So do the internal memos and communications that led to the hastily assembled ICA. We’ve never seen the documents from Brennan’s so-called “fusion cell,” the internal CIA cables, or the strategic deliberations behind the December 9, 2016 leak to the Washington Post.

The same goes for the orchestration behind Tapper’s Steele dossier report, the false New York Times article linking the Trump campaign to Russian intelligence, and the suppression of Igor Danchenko’s disavowals. We still don’t have the DOJ’s internal records on targeting Jeff Sessions or the engineered congressional briefing that helped set the Mueller investigation in motion.

The critical paper trail behind the 2017 phase of the operation remains sealed away because that’s where the real story is. And everything we’re learning now — the misdirection, the selective releases, the slow drip — may be designed to keep us from ever getting to that truth.