U.S. intelligence officials allegedly asked foreign allied nations to spy on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign team, sparking the infamous Russia collusion hoax, according to a new report.
Journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag claimed in a Substack report out Tuesday that “multiple credible sources” close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation revealed that the U.S. Intelligence Community, including then-President Barack Obama’s CIA, illegally asked the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to target 26 Trump advisors “long before the summer of 2016.” The U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand make up the members of that alliance.
“After Public and Racket had been told that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to target, a source confirmed that the IC had “identified [them] as people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate. They were targets of our own IC and law enforcement — targets for collection and misinformation,” the report noted.
FBI started spying on the Trump campaign after foreign governments “by chance” discovered evidence that his advisors were colluding with the Russians, the government says. But now, multiple credible sources tell us that the CIA asked foreign allies to spy on 26 Trump associates. pic.twitter.com/YeJhZBSEVq
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) February 13, 2024
“Unknown details about the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign and raw intelligence related to the IC’s surveillance of the Trump campaign are in a 10-inch binder that Trump ordered to be declassified at the very end of his term,” the sources revealed.
“If the top-secret documents exist proving these charges, they are potentially proof that multiple US intelligence officials broke laws against spying and election interference,” the report stated.
The journalists noted that “CNN, Politico, The Guardian, and others reported in 2017 that the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA), was the ‘principal whistleblower’ in the investigation into the alleged ties between Trump and the Russian government.”
“But now, sources say the GCHQ’s version of events is false. Instead, the US IC asked its foreign allies to target 26 members of Trump’s team, possibly to justify the FBI’s investigation,” they explained.
“The IC, a source said, considered the 26 Trump campaign people identified to ‘bump’ or ‘reverse target,’ or manipulate through confidential human sources (CHSs), to be easy marks because of their relative inexperience,” the report noted. “Doing so was illegal, both because US law prohibits such intelligence gathering unless authorized by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant and because the weaponization of the IC for political purposes constitutes election interference.”
Fox News host Jesse Watters covered the bombshell report about how the Russia hoax was all an Obama CIA “set up.”
Report: Deep state is scrambling to find a missing top-secret binder that shows how Obama’s CIA set up the Russia hoax @shellenberger @mtaibbi pic.twitter.com/oBvKRrqkkp
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) February 14, 2024
“The now-known significance of that binder also raises the specter that the search of Mar-a-Lago wasn’t to protect classified materials but to protect intelligence agencies — American and foreign,” according to The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland.
And while the mainstream media continues to ignore the stunning report, previous commentary such as a 2020 tweet from George Papadopoulos, a 2016 Trump foreign policy adviser, seems even more intriguing.
There has been confusion about what #Obamagate is. So let me summarize it:
The weopanization of both domestic, and foreign, intelligence against a presidential campaign from a sitting administration solely for political purposes to prevent the smooth transition of power
— George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) May 25, 2020
Shellenberger refuted many comments about the report being “old news” n response to the social media post about the report.
“This is a massive scoop that upends what people knew about the origins of the Russia collusion hoax,” he wrote on X.
There are people in the replies suggesting that “we already knew this.”
No, we didn’t. And no, you didn’t. Only a tiny number of people knew about this until now.
And, as we note in our story, “If the top-secret documents exist proving these charges, they are potentially…
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) February 13, 2024
“In our piece, we describe how what has already been reported supports our new findings,” the journalist wrote. “And more is coming soon…”