We already knew that the FBI used the Clinton-funded Steele Dossier to obtain FISA warrants and justify spying on Trump campaign officials in the hopes of thwarting his campaign and undermining his presidency. But this week we learned that the CIA under Barack Obama recruited the intelligence services of foreign allies to illegally spy on 26 associates of Donald Trump before the FBI launched its counterintelligence probe in the summer of 2016.
But before we get more into that, let’s take a step back. Back in December, CNN reported that a binder “containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed.”
Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.
In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.
But that’s not true. According to a report from Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag, the binder contains evidence of the CIA’s efforts to spy on Trump and interfere in the 2016 election. And this binder is what the Biden administration was really after when they raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
CNN and its intelligence sources meant “exposure” in a bad way. Sources have told Public and Racket, however, that the secrets officials worry might be “exposed” are ones that would implicate them in widespread abuses of intelligence authority dating back to the 2015-2016 election season.
“I would call [the binder] Trump’s insurance policy,” said someone knowledgeable about the case. “He was very concerned about having it and taking it with him because it was the road map” of Russiagate.
Transgressions range from Justice Department surveillance of domestic political targets without probable cause to the improper unmasking of a pre-election conversation between a Trump official and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to WMD-style manipulation of intelligence for public reports on alleged Russian “influence activities.”
CNN’s report claimed that intelligence officials were worried about the exposure of “sources and methods that informed the U.S. government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election.”
According to Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Gutentag, “They should be concerned,” though clearly for different reasons. “The story of how a team ‘hand-picked’ by CIA Director John Brennan relied on ‘cooked intelligence’ to craft that January 6th, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment is the subject of tomorrow’s story, the last in this three-part series.”
Several sources suggest that Trump’s ownership of the binder, or one of several binders, prompted the FBI to conduct a raid on Mar-a-Lago, and this is why the Biden administration is prosecuting him.
According to a source from the House Intelligence investigation, they believe that much of the material at Mar-a-Lago is what the investigators thoroughly examined. “We think a lot of that product in Mar-a-Lago is” what investigators “went through,” the source said. The FBI was “worried that there was a copy [of the binder] there.”
“I think [retrieving the binder] was part of [FBI’s] motivation. It was Russiagate,” a source close to Trump said. “It was years of FISA [surveillance warrant] abuse. It was doing a 702 [FISA] query to surveil 300,000 Americans. It was using taxpayer dollars to fund the Steele memo and get Justice Department lawyers when we fired Christopher Steele. It was the mountain of corruption we uncovered.”