The Russian in Russia-Gate

By Cliff Kincaid May 20, 2023

The observations made by Durham and his staff indicate the FBI’s corruption goes far beyond political bias against former President Trump.  But Durham didn’t draw the conclusion that the FBI has been infiltrated by Russian agents and that the agency cannot be reformed until they are exposed and rooted out.

The cover-up continues.

In the most explosive revelation about the Get Trump investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane, Durham raises the idea that the anti-Trump Steele report was Russian disinformation.

Steele was the last name of former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, a “confirmed socialist” in college at Oxford when he was hired by MI6, another point of suspicion for someone who would be dispatched to Moscow as a spy and later serve as head of the Russian desk at MI6.

The Durham report adds to the obvious conclusion that the Russians originated the idea that Trump was a Russian agent and provided the “disinformation” in the Steele dossier which drove the FBI investigation of former President Trump and his associates.

Regarding the so-called Russia-gate scandal, the late anti-communist freedom fighter Vladimir Bukovsky said, “For the first time, the left-wing establishment discovered the Russian threat. Previously, they didn’t see any threat. When it was real and we tried to attract the attention of the world to the Russian threat, we were accused of being paranoid and unrealistic and things like that. Now we have proven we were not paranoid. It did exist. Suddenly, the world discovers the Russian threat. That, of course, is a political game.”

But these “political games” are more ominous than they seem. Remember that FBI counterintelligence special agent Robert P. Hanssen was a Soviet/Russian mole inside the bureau. His record of treason spanned 22 years, from 1979 to 2001. Robert S. Mueller, the Russia-gate special counsel, became FBI director after Hanssen was caught. Mueller then failed to reform the bureau to catch future spies.

Under Mueller, the investigation into the post-9/11 anthrax attacks that killed five Americans was officially “closed” after the agency conveniently blamed a dead man, who committed suicide under FBI pressure, for the anthrax murders. Another suspect in the case, Dr. Steven Hatfill, was harassed and hounded by federal agents. But Hatfill stood up to the pressure and eventually collected a financial settlement from the federal government for the damage to his career and reputation.

From the start of the FBI’s inquiry, the bureau seemed determined to eliminate Al Qaeda as a source of the attacks, even though the terrorist group’s biological weapons program was run by an identified Soviet KGB agent,  Ayman al-Zawahiri.

But there’s a key fact not highlighted in the Durham report about Russia-gate: the Steele dossier, full of Russian disinformation, was peddled not only by the Democrats but by Senator John McCain to frame President Trump and other officials as Russian agents.

Regarding the Crossfire Hurricane smear campaign against Trump, the Durham report says (in a footnote) that the FBI failed to consider the “possibility” that “some or much of the non-open source information contained in Steele’s reporting was Russian disinformation (that wittingly or unwittingly) was passed along to Steele, or that the reporting was otherwise not credible.”

The “non-open source information” means it was supposed to come from secret but reliable FBI sources.

The term “Russian disinformation” means that it was deliberately released by the Russian intelligence services to confuse and mislead people.

FBI officials may have been so anti-Trump that they were willing to use Russian disinformation to paint Trump as a Russian agent. But it could also be the case that Russian agents or sympathizers in the FBI knew the information was false and therefore disinformation and used it anyway. It may ultimately mean that Crossfire Hurricane was a Russian “active measures” operation using communist disinformation and propaganda from the beginning.

We will never know for sure until these officials are identified and investigated. Who will do that?  Durham did not.

The Durham report raises serious questions as to whether there was a communist mole or group of enemy agents in the FBI protecting the agency’s “sources.”

Perhaps the FBI didn’t care or didn’t want to know the truth about the Russian intelligence connections of the sources behind the anti-Trump Steele dossier.

This conclusion is potentially far worse than saying that FBI officials or agents had a political bias.

In the body of the report, as well as the footnote previously cited, Durham states that “it appears the FBI never gave appropriate consideration to the possibility that the intelligence [Igor] Danchenko was providing to Steele — which, again, according to Danchenko himself, made up a significant majority of the information in the Steele Dossier reports – was, in whole or in part, Russian disinformation.”

Igor Danchenko was “a senior research analyst in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution” and co-authored a paper on Russia and China with Erica Downs, a former CIA analyst, and Fiona Hill, who served as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S. National Intelligence Council.

Danchenko, who has Russian citizenship and an American green card, was acquitted on four counts of lying to the FBI, in a case brought by Durham. “We have known all along that Igor Danchenko was innocent and we are glad the American public knows that now too,” declared one of his lawyers, Stuart Sears.

A Washington Post story on the verdict declared, “Durham says Steele dossier source lied. But the FBI long valued him.” Indeed, an FBI agent testified he was a valuable source, an indication that the problems in the bureau have not been resolved.

Going further back in time, when Senator Barack Hussein Obama was running for the presidency, the FBI raised no concerns about his relationship with Frank Marshall Davis, who was not only a communist but a pornographer who wrote a semi-biographical novel about having sex with a 13-year-old girl. He mentored Obama for as many as nine years of his young life in Hawaii.

Obama had referred to Davis in his memoir as merely “Frank,” a poet filled with knowledge and advice. The real identity as that of Frank Marshall Davis was disclosed by a writer for a Communist Party publication, who said it would prove to be historically significant, and then publicized by anti-communist New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon. I confirmed the identity of “Frank” with a source in Hawaii and then obtained and posted the Davis FBI file.

Then-President Obama was among a group of high-level officials, according to the Durham report, briefed on the plan to frame Trump as a Russian agent.