President Donald Trump continues to vent at top Democrats he claims carried out the Russia ‘hoax,’ calling it it a ‘crime’ after his FBI Director Kash Patel said he uncovered a trove of classified material in agency ‘burn bags.’
‘They must pay for the crime of the Century!’ Trump wrote Thursday night, reposting a clip by conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson.
The clip has Hanson saying the nation’s intel agencies ‘knew’ that there was no Trump campaign collusion with Russia and calling out a conspiracy of the ‘top people’ in U.S. intelligence ‘conspiring with a sitting president of the United States to destroy Donald J. Trump’ – and pictures grainy video clips of Barack Obama.
Members of Trump’s national security team are overseeing declassification of material from the Russia probe dating to Trump’s 2016 campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
A series of explosive headlines have followed. The effort to put new and sensational information into the public sphere comes as Trump continues to beat back questions about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, fueled by his own recent comments that the sex offender ‘took’ staff from his spa at Mar-a-Lago.
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Iowa Republican Charles Grassley, 91, released a bombshell 29-page classified file related to the Russia probe.
The annex from former Special Counsel John Durham’s report contains emails and other documents purporting to show a Clinton plan to link the Trump campaign to Russia.
One such email, purporting to come from Leonard Benardo of the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations states: ‘Julie [Clinton Campaign Advisor] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump,’ one of his emails disclosed in the Durham annex states. ‘Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.’
However Benardo told investigators he hadn’t seen seen the July 25, 2016 email, didn’t know who Julie was, and wouldn’t have used that concluding phrase.
The partly-redacted documents says some analysts noted that Benardo’s emails appeared authentic and he had been hacked by the Russians, but others noted it was possible they were ‘fabricated or altered,’ undermining the central claim that there was a coordinated plot to destroy Trump’s presidency.
Investigators couldn’t find the specific emails in question, but they did uncover messages that used the exact same language.
Special Counsel John Durham later wrote that Clinton campaign advisor Julianne Smith ‘was, at minimum, playing a role in the campaign’s efforts to link Trump to Russia.’
Durham said the emails gave ‘at least some credence’ to the idea that such a plan existed. He was appointed during Trump’s first term to investigate the origins of the Russia probe.
Durham also noted that regardless of whether the so-called ‘Clinton Plan’ was true or based on unreliable intelligence, investigators should have been more skeptical about politically charged information. Notably, the Clinton campaign helped fund the now-debunked Steele dossier, classifying the expense as legal services.
Clinton herself told investigators is ‘looked like Russian disinformation to [her].’
Trump dove into the ‘burn bag’ story despite a day earlier not initially catching the drift of a question about it.
Trump, who has accused former President Barack Obama of ‘treason’ over recent disclosures by his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, kept up the drum beat on Truth Social.
‘The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax is now totally undisputed! The facts are all there, in black and white,’ he wrote, sprinkling in all-caps. ‘It is the biggest scandal in American History. The perpetrators of this crime must pay a big price. This can never be allowed to happen in our Country again!’
Trump also posted a video clip by Devin Nunes, the former California GOP lawmakers who oversaw a report released by Gabbard.
Trump quotes Nunes, who now runs his media company in his TV appearance, writing: ‘What we now know for sure is not only was this a plan by Hillary Clinton, but this is also a plan of the Soros Society…the same people doing the same nonsense—from 2016 all the way up until the raid at Mar-a-Lago