Democrats and the FBI Collude Again on a Russia Smear against Republicans
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
July 30, 2022 6:30 AM
This time, they’ve been able to turn Democratic collusion with foreign powers into an illusion of disinformation.
Not since Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers has a couple gone cheek-to-cheek quite like Democrats and the FBI.
This spring, we watched special counsel John Durham’s first Russiagate trial blow up on him, not because he lacked evidence of a 2016 fraudulent scheme to portray Donald Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin, but because he portrayed one of the two main schemers, the FBI, as if it were a victim. In Durham’s indictment, the Clinton campaign lies to the bureau’s babes in the woods, gulling them into opening a baseless foreign-counterintelligence probe of whether her Republican rival is a Putin puppet. In Durham’s proof at trial, however, top FBI officials turn out to be fully aware that they are colluding with Clinton campaign operatives in exploiting political opposition research to try to nail Trump — and then labor to cover their tracks.
It’s an unfortunate blind spot. Durham has one conviction so far: a guilty plea from FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, whose manipulation of a document caused the FISA court to be deceived into granting a surveillance warrant to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser — again, substantially based on the Clinton campaign’s bogus opposition research. Except the case wasn’t charged as a fraud on the court. It was charged as a false statement to another FBI official. Yes, it seems even when the FBI itself lies, the victim is . . . the FBI.
And now we learn how adaptable the Democrat–FBI Russia two-step is: You can run it in reverse! Not only can the scheme distort actual disinformation into an illusion of Republican collusion with foreign powers. It also can turn actual Democratic collusion with foreign powers into an illusion of disinformation. Now, that’s some choreography, right there.
We’ve written a good bit about how Democrats and the Biden campaign, aided and abetted by their collaborators in media, social media, and the distressingly partisan network of current and former government national-security officials (pillars of the so-called Deep State, which I am going to have to stop describing as “so-called”), tried to con the country into believing Hunter Biden’s patently authentic “Laptop from Hell” was Russian disinformation. Well, now we see the fuller picture of how, far from pulling this tall tale out of the sky when the New York Post exposed the Hunter laptop in October 2020, these operatives simply incorporated it into a Biden campaign narrative that Democrats and pliant FBI officials had concocted two months earlier.
FBI Knew That Fear the Bidens Were Compromised Was Not Based on Disinformation
Republicans controlled the Senate in the 116th Congress in 2019, when Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) of the Finance Committee and Chairman Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs began probing the Biden family business of cashing in on Joe’s political influence. The focus was fishy foreign financial transactions. By then, the Justice Department and the FBI had been onto Hunter’s shenanigans for a year — again, long before the laptop’s existence emerged.
The government’s national-security apparatus had every reason to know the Bidens were compromised. As I’ve detailed, one of the family’s most lucrative deals had it partnering with a Shanghai-based conglomerate called CEFC, which turned out to be a Chinese intelligence operation. This is the deal where Joe Biden — “the big guy” — was to get a 10 percent cut . . . which may explain why he was so relieved that a New York Times exposé seemed only minimally damaging that he called Hunter (the son with whom he never talked business, no siree) to opine that Hunter was “in the clear.”
Among CEFC’s key executives was Patrick Ho, once described by Hunter as “the f***ing spy chief of China.” Ho was prosecuted by the Justice Department on foreign-corruption charges. Months before his arrest, CEFC’s top executive (and Xi Jinping protégé) Ye Jianming paid Hunter $1 million to snoop around and try to find out what the government had on Ho. That turned out to be a lot. In February 2018, federal prosecutors advised the defense that Hunter’s client, Ho, had been the subject of national-security surveillance under FISA. Within a week of this notice, the Chinese regime arrested Ye. He has not been seen in public since, and the regime quietly let the multibillion-dollar conglomerate go bust.
The Bidens were being lavishly paid by CEFC: It is documented that $6 million went into the family coffers. Hunter once related that Ye had offered him $10 million annually just for “introductions.” Given that the FBI appears to have been monitoring Ho and CEFC as clandestine agents of the communist Chinese regime, what chance is there that the Biden connection was an important aspect of the FBI’s CEFC probe? They’ll never tell us, of course, because it’s all classified, but I’m betting it’s a pretty good chance since a major goal of any counterintelligence investigation is to detect whether the U.S. government has vulnerabilities on which a foreign power is capitalizing — often by paying lots of money to influential Americans. If the FBI didn’t know about the Bidens and the Chinese regime, then we should be asking why we’re plowing billions of dollars into the foreign-counterintelligence budget.
The Grassley–Johnson investigation homed in on the foreign funding streams pouring into Biden accounts. This obviously was not disinformation planted by foreign intelligence services. Much of it was signaled by suspicious-activity reports filed by financial institutions. (Banks file such reports when they suspect transactions are traceable to potentially illegal activity, or when the transactions appear to be structured in a manner designed to defeat federal reporting requirements.)
In addition, we now know that in early 2019, Hunter told one of his “escorts” that accounts of his had been frozen because he was making payments for “escort services” that were tied to Russian accounts. So . . . a bevy of Eastern European prostitutes knew that it really was Hunter Biden behind money sluicing between intriguing foreign accounts and accounts that, whaddya know, really were controlled by Hunter Biden. Is it so hard to imagine that the FBI might have figured that out, too? Just maybe?
Not Quite Efrem Zimbalist Jr.’s FBI
In today’s FBI, progressive political bias is so notorious that what used to be shocking to humiliated bureau defenders (such as moi) has become a rueful punch line. Thankfully, hardworking case agents still habitually follow the evidence wherever it leads. That, however, doesn’t mean their political-hack bosses won’t undermine them.
As 2020 wore on, leading Democrats grew increasingly alarmed that what looked like a cakewalk for Joe Biden could turn into a close election. He had no more blatant vulnerability than streams of foreign money that could support Biden’s well-earned reputation for being willfully blind, at best, to his family’s propensity to monetize his government power. Grassley and Johnson were turning up potentially damaging information. Something had to be done.
And what do Democrats do these days when they need election help? They call the FBI.
In Durham’s prosecution, we saw that when 2016 Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann wanted to plant disinformation about Trump–Russia collusion to trigger an FBI investigation, he targeted the bureau’s then–general counsel Jim Baker — an old friend from their Justice Department days. Sussmann knew he could text Baker on a Sunday night and be confident of getting a Monday meeting in the bureau’s executive suite. Sussmann even had a badge giving him access to FBI headquarters. No surprise then that he got both his meeting and the FBI investigation of Trump that the Clinton campaign was hoping for.
In 2020, the situation was reversed. This time, the evidence was very real and damaging to Democrats, so what party heavyweights needed was to thwart any significant FBI investigation, preferably by branding the evidence as disinformation.
Wonder of wonders, the Democrats found willing FBI officials. Two of them are called out in Grassley’s letter.
The first is Timothy Thibault, a longtime bureau muckety-muck who is the top FBI agent in the District of Columbia investigative division (his title is assistant special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office — ASAC of WFO in bureau-speak). The WFO handles some of the government’s most sensitive investigations — sensitive because they have political ramifications. (I’m sure it will give you comfort to know that among Thibault’s predecessors heading up the WFO was Andrew McCabe.) We met Thibault a few weeks back, courtesy of another Grassley letter referring him for investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Besides apparently brandishing his FBI credentials to draw attention to his very active social-media presence (a violation of various rules), Thibault engages in partisan public commentary, taking aim at Republicans, the Trump administration, the Catholic Church, the American South (“Can we give Kentucky to the Russian Federation” — is this guy hilarious or what?).
Then there is supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten. We didn’t know him by name, but some of his crackerjack intelligence analysis is outlined in the IG’s report on the FBI’s abuse of FISA surveillance authority in the Trump–Russia probe. After the FBI had already used the blatantly bogus and uncorroborated Steele dossier in sworn applications to obtain FISA warrants, it finally interviewed the sources relied on by former British spy Christopher Steele for the conclusion that Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin. Auten was the “supervisory intel analyst” identified in the report, trusted by the FBI to handle the interview of Igor Danchenko, Steele’s “primary sub-source” — and himself suspected by the bureau to be a Russian spy (see the IG Report, pp. 186-190). Danchenko told Auten and other agents that Steele had extensively distorted the information Danchenko passed along to him, much of which was rank rumor and innuendo. Yet, I’m sure you’ll be stunned to learn that after these interviews, the FBI continued to rely on Steele’s information in its FISA applications. Unbelievably, the FISA court was informed that Danchenko was credible, but not that what he was credible about was Steele’s utter lack of credibility.
What a pair.
The Democrat–FBI Disinformation about Disinformation Campaign
Grassley’s recent letter relates that, as he and Johnson collected damaging Biden information, four senior congressional Democrats — then-Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as Senator Mark Warner and Congressman Adam Schiff, top Dems on the intelligence committees — dashed off a letter to the FBI on July 13, 2020. In it, they fretted that Congress could be the subject of a foreign-disinformation campaign and sought a “defensive briefing.”
Three days later, this request was elaborated on by Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Gary Peters. They were the ranking members of the committees then headed by Grassley and Johnson, respectively, and thus privy to the Biden information then being amassed. The two Democrats requested a briefing from the FBI about potential foreign disinformation tied specifically to the Grassley–Johnson investigation.
Grassley maintains that there was no need for such a briefing because the information he and Johnson were gathering was substantially verifiable and, ergo, not disinformation. I would further observe, as I’ve detailed on other occasions, that even when the source of information is known or truly suspected to be a foreign intelligence service (which the Biden information substantially was not), this does not perforce mean the information is false. Sometimes, for example, Russia floats information that is true — and quite intentionally so because it is embarrassing to American officials. So even if one believes in good faith that Russia or China, say, are putting out Biden data, that would not by itself make that data disinformation. Yet, that’s what Democrats and their confederates would have you believe — if the information is derogatory, it must be both sourced to a foreign intelligence service and untrue.
According to Grassley, the FBI was happy to help the Democrats in that enterprise. After the bureau received the letters from the top Democrats, Auten worked up an intelligence “assessment” that concluded derogatory Biden evidence was disinformation. Grassley says unidentified FBI whistleblowers have recounted that agents working the Biden investigation were interviewed in connection with Auten’s assessment and pushed back against their headquarters’ claims of disinformation risk, arguing that their reporting either had been verified or could be verified using ordinary investigative techniques (e.g., search warrants). Nevertheless, FBI headquarters purported to conclude that this derogatory Biden data was disinformation. To cover their tracks, Grassley says that in September 2020, FBI headquarters officials “placed their findings with respect to whether reporting was disinformation in a restricted access sub-file reviewable only by particular agents.”
Meantime, in August 2020, the FBI invited members of Congress to be briefed on possible foreign interference in the election campaign.
Grassley says the briefing he and Johnson received, which was “unsolicited and unnecessary,” related to the Biden investigation that the Auten assessment sought to discredit, over the dissent of case investigators. Parts of the Biden investigation, Grassley explains, were leaked to the media in order to paint the evidence gathered “in a false light.” On August 13, 2020, for example, the Associated Press published a report suggesting a government “intelligence assessment” raised the question of whether Senator Johnson’s effort to investigate Biden family dealings with Ukraine, among other foreign governments, was “mimicking” Russian efforts to spread disinformation and “amplifying its propaganda.”
Grassley goes on to note that “in October 2020, an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed at the direction of ASAC Thibault.” Moreover, not content with merely closing this part of the case “without providing a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines,” Thibault also “attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the senator.
Grassley does not further describe this “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting.” We do know, however, that October 2020 — the dwindling weeks right before Election Day — is when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And how’s this for a coincidence: At the same time that Thibault was shutting down part of the Biden investigation, an array of 51 former U.S. national-security officials released their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails.” It’s a remarkably deceptive piece of, well, disinformation, strongly suggesting that the Hunter laptop contents were Russian disinformation — but, when read closely, the officials admit that they are merely “suspicious” and actually have no basis in solid fact to conclude that the contents were disinformation. Naturally, the 2020 Biden campaign happily peddled this government-approved Russian disinformation storyline — just as the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign had happily peddled the bureau-promoted narrative that Trump had established a communications back channel with the Kremlin.
How to Get Their Attention
With Democrats running both congressional chambers and the Justice Department, an investigation of the FBI’s collusion with Democrats to influence another American presidential election is not in the cards at the moment. Republicans could and should vow to investigate this latest budding bureau scandal thoroughly once they take control of one or both houses of Congress. But let’s be frank. There have already been numerous investigations of FBI politicization, misconduct, and abuse of power over the last several years. Congress investigates, the Justice Department investigates, the FISA court investigates . . . and nothing happens.
What ought to happen has become increasingly clear. The FBI’s foreign-counterintelligence mission should be reassigned to another agency that is strictly an intelligence service with no police responsibilities. The bureau should be restricted to law enforcement. That is what it knows how to do well.
Just as important, law enforcement has to be transparent. In the criminal-justice system, discovery rules and court oversight ensure that the bureau’s work will be checked, which incentivizes police to do it by the book, without political bias. Intelligence activities are classified. The shroud over them creates too much temptation toward mischief — including politically motivated abuse of power. The FBI used to be the premier federal police force, which had a domestic-security sideline. With the onslaught of jihadist terrorism that began in the 1990s, and especially after 9/11, the sideline — the intelligence mission — became such a priority that it has corrupted the bureau’s ethos. The combination of intense secrecy and awesome law-enforcement power is too combustible when entrusted to an agency that has lost the public’s trust and that has shown, time after time, that it is resistant to oversight.
If you want to get the FBI’s attention, restrict its mission, cut its budget, and hold higher-ups at the bureau and its mother ship, the Justice Department, accountable for malfeasance. There is no reason to believe, at this point, that anything else will work.
