Will Any Russia Hoaxers Go to Jail?

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The CIA recently revealed that former director John Brennan wanted to include the discredited Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of the 2016 election. As the people might recall, in his 2020 Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad, Brennan repeatedly claims “Vladimir Putin personally ordered the influence campaign to boost Donald Trump’s election prospects.”

The Russia hoax bullhorns never explained how, exactly, Putin influenced the election. It now emerges that in 2020 China’s Communist Party manufactured thousands of fake American driver’s licenses, which could help stateside Chinese nationals to vote illegally through mail ballots. The FBI knew about China’s campaign but held off because it would contradict the testimony of then-FBI director Christopher Wray.

“We have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise,” Wray told Congress in September 2020.

News of the fake licenses first emerged in June, when FBI Director Kash Patel declassified a document revealing China’s fraud campaign. The allegations “while substantiated, were abruptly recalled and never disclosed to the public.” The report was recalled on the instruction of Nikki Floris, the FBI’s Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, who served as the FBI’s “election security lead” in 2020. Sen. Charles Grassley is calling for an investigation, and while the probe proceeds, Wray’s FBI record deserves a second look.

In 2016 Wray denied that any “spying” on the Trump campaign had taken place, and the new FBI boss had “no reason” to doubt the intelligence that said the Russian government ordered an effort to harm Clinton and help Trump. So Wray was already on board with the FBI’s handling of the investigation of Trump codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”

Wray transformed the FBI into Joe Biden’s secret police,  sending a 25–member FBI SWAT team to the residence of pro-life activist Mark Houck. Parents protesting the indoctrination of their children were branded violent extremists and domestic terrorists. Under Wray, the FBI raided the residence of Donald Trump, but Wray’s FBI paid no attention to the classified documents Joe Biden had strewn all over his garage and home.

In August 2023 in Utah, an FBI SWAT team shot dead Craig Robertson, a 75-year-old woodworker, for threats to Biden he allegedly made online. Threats to the president are normally handled by the Secret Service, but this was an FBI operation.

Last July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, Thomas Matthew Crooks unleashed eight shots at Donald Trump, one wounding the candidate in the ear. Shortly after the assassination attempt, Wray told the House Judiciary Committee that, “with respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”

As CNN reports, “the FBI is investigating former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey for possible false statements to Congress following a referral from the current CIA Director John Ratcliffe.” Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, along with other CIA bosses, were signatory to the letter charging that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

In 2019, the late Angelo Codevilla wondered “Why Are Brennan and Clapper Not in Jail?” based on their violations of Section 798, 18 U.S. Code, which forbids the disclosure of classified documents. In February 2020, Codevilla wrote “Abolish FISA, Reform FBI, and Break Up CIA,” contending:

Intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part. Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield.

Codevilla spoke from unmatched experience. He received his first security clearance at age 23, when he worked for Bendix Aerospace Systems Division on Air Force contracts to study Soviet military tactics. Three years later Codevilla served as U.S. Navy officer assigned to military intelligence. That involved training in counterintelligence investigations and a tour of duty as an intelligence briefer for the chief of naval operations.

In the U.S. Foreign Service, Codevilla served as a regional analyst in Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Service on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, gave the intel vet “a unique bird’s-eye view,” as he explained in his 1992 book Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century.  As the author noted, in 1974 the CIA fired counterintelligence chief James Angleton, and after that, “the primacy of social and bureaucratic considerations” took over, and “this hurt American CI [counterintelligence] badly.”

For example, John Walker’s 16-year campaign of selling US Navy code machines and daily settings to the Soviet union went totally undetected by US counterintelligence. As Codevilla showed, the KGB easily routed the CIA on many occasions, and with the CIA increasingly relying on technical collection, the agency missed the greatest movement of modern times:

The revolution that swept Eastern Europe in 1989, an event that ranks in importance with WWI, was wholly unheralded by technical intelligence. Antennas sensitive to millionths of amps, and orbiting cameras that could detect mice on the earth’s surface, did not see hundreds of millions of people ready to overthrow the communist world.

For Codevilla, this came as no surprise. The CIA line on East Germany “had not deviated far from East German propaganda” and “those who wanted to win the Cold War lost out to those who wanted to manage a perpetual competitive-cooperative relationship with the USSR.” Long after the peoples of the East had broken the Soviet empire, “the U.S. government was still nursing wishes for good relations with that empire.” The CIA bosses admitted no wrong and “their disdain for American conservatives is not cerebral but visceral, the kind that Brahmins have for lower castes.”

In 1980, four years after the CIA fired James Angleton, the CIA hired Fordham University grad John Brennan, who in 1976 voted to elect the Stalinist Gus Hall, presidential candidate of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. Instead of showing him the door, the CIA hired Brennan, who rose through the ranks with lightning speed. The Undaunted author describes the scene at the CIA on Sept. 11, 2001:

We learned that the Pentagon had been attacked and that a plane had crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania … George [Tenet] called his senior staff back into the room to coordinate actions that the CIA would need to take as the attack against our homeland was unfolding.

So the mighty CIA knew nothing in advance about the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. The Gus Hall voter believed “the Islamic teaching that jihad is a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal,” and “violence and jihad not necessarily synonymous.” As jihadist threats mounted, Brennan explored ways to get Obama elected.

In 2013, Obama tapped Brennan to run the CIA, which he duly transformed into a woke bureaucracy deployed against Obama’s domestic opponents. Director John Ratcliffe should heed the advice of Angelo Codevilla in Informing Statecraft. “The worst way to build an intelligence service is to set a bureaucracy on its rails and let it roll on, perpetuating itself,” Codevilla wrote. The nation needs a new intelligence service “open to talent rather than driven by bureaucratic priorities.”

FBI reform is off to a good start under Kash Patel, who has plenty on his plate. Patel needs to reveal what the FBI seized from DHS whistleblower Philip Haney, author of See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad. In early 2020, after Haney was gunned down under mysterious circumstances, the FBI mounted no manhunt, announced no suspects and did not advance a possible motive.

The initial report of the forensic pathologist was death by homicide, but under sheriff Gary Redman, a graduate of the FBI Academy, that was changed to suicide. While revelations await, the secret FISA court, a belch from the Carter Era, should be abolished at first opportunity.

FISA judge James Boasberg greenlighted the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” covert operation against candidate and President Trump. Boasberg then moved to the D.C. Circuit to handle the case of FBI assistant general counsel Kevin Clinesmith. He altered an email for the purpose of exposing former Trump campaign aide Carter Page to surveillance under FISA. The FBI forger faced five years in prison but Boasberg let him off with probation and community service.  Comey, Clapper, Brennan et al got nothing, and they remain in triumphal mode.

If none of the deep-state dons goes to prison, the people can expect more hoaxes, more lies, and more mysterious shootings with no motive, no suspects, and evidence kept secret. To paraphrase Milan Kundera, the struggle of the people against the deep state is the struggle of memory against forgetting. One year after Trump was nearly gunned down, it’s still time to “Fight! Fight! Fight!”