We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.
Shortly after Donald Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey for refusing to say publicly that he wasn’t the target of an investigation, the FBI sought what can only be interpreted as revenge. It opened the most extraordinary investigation in the bureau’s history on a sitting president.
Advertisement
The FBI said that it believed that Donald Trump was a Russian agent and he needed to be investigated.
On what iron-clad, slam-dunk, compelling basis did it start investigating the United States chief executive? I’ll get back to you on that.
This was the second FBI investigation opened on Trump and his associates. The first investigation, opened in late July 2016, attempted to determine if Carter Page and George Papadopoulos had “links” to the Russian government. This was the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. This new probe was targeting the president himself.
On May 16, 2017, less than five months after Trump took office, the FBI claimed to have an “articulable factual basis” to suspect that Donald Trump, either “wittingly or unwittingly,” was acting in the interests of the Russian government and accordingly posing “threats to the national security of the United States.”
The New York Times “uncovered” (or, more likely, it was leaked) this second, more explosive investigation of Trump in 2019. The reasons for opening such an extraordinary file were the subject of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the investigative team at RealClear Investigations (RCI) in August 2022.
On Dec. 31, 2024, RCI got a reply: six pages, heavily redacted, that only piqued interest in the reasons for that second investigation.
The decision to proceed with the investigation to determine if Donald Trump was a Russian asset was made by then-acting FBI director Andrew McCabe.
Advertisement
According to the declassified document, McCabe’s decision was approved by FBI Assistant Director Bill Priestap, who had also signed off on the opening of Crossfire Hurricane; and Jim Baker, the FBI general counsel. Baker was a longtime friend of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and a key figure in the dissemination of Clinton-funded disinformation to the FBI that falsely tied Trump to Russia. In his FBI role, Baker personally circulated the conspiracy theory, manufactured by “researchers” working with the Clinton campaign, that the Trump campaign and Russia were communicating via a secret server. After leaving the FBI, Baker served as deputy general counsel at Twitter, where he backed the company’s censorship of reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, based on yet another conspiracy theory that the laptop files were Russian disinformation.
“Imagine even opening this investigation up on just your average Joe,” says Aaron Maté of RealClear Investigations. “That would be crazy, unless you have some real predication. But this is the f***ing president. Andrew McCabe decides that he can do this. On what basis?”
Matt Taibbi pointed out, “Either the FBI had evidence to start such an investigation, which would be damning to Trump, or it didn’t, which would be damning to the FBI. Which was it?”
That the FBI refuses to say is pretty damning.
While they redacted any reasons in the six-page declassified document, other sources strongly suggest that the FBI opened that treason investigation on Trump because of the infamous Steele Dossier, which had already been thoroughly debunked.
Advertisement
According to a January 2019 account in the New York Times, which first revealed the FBI’s decision to investigate Trump, the Steele dossier – a collection of conspiracy theories funded by Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton – was among the “factors” that “fueled the F.B.I.’s concerns.”
Just two days before McCabe opened the May 2017 probe, the FBI, via Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, renewed contact with dossier author Christopher Steele despite having terminated him as a source back in November 2016. As RCI’s Paul Sperry has previously reported, this sudden outreach to Steele right before the opening of a new Trump-Russia conspiracy investigation indicated that the FBI was seeking to re-engage the Clinton-funded British operative to help it build a case against the president for espionage and obstruction of justice. At the time, the FBI was still relying on Steele’s fabrications for its surveillance warrants against Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page. The following month, the FBI filed the last of its four FISA court warrants based on Steele’s material. The Justice Department has since invalidated two of those warrants on the grounds that they were based on “material misstatements.”
By 2017, Steele had been thoroughly discredited as a law enforcement source. But as a political assassin, he was perfect. The FBI pulled Steele out of mothballs and tried to tap his “sources” again.
The FBI re-enlisted Steele despite possessing information that thoroughly discredited him. Five months before it newly sought Steele’s help to investigate the sitting president, the FBI interviewed Igor Danchenko, whom Steele had used as his dossier’s key “sub-source.” In that January 2017 meeting, Danchenko told FBI agents that corroboration for the dossier’s claims was “zero”; that he had “no idea” where claims sourced to him came from; and that the Russia-Trump rumors he passed along to Steele came from alcohol-fueled “word of mouth and hearsay.” The FBI had also been unable to corroborate any of Steele’s incendiary claims.
Advertisement
This was the “articulable factual basis” upon which a sitting president was smeared and impeached.
Trump has promised to get to the bottom of this. Democrats will claim it’s “old news,” but the reality is that it’s never too late to seek the truth.