…..The Department of Justice’s inspector general released a report on some of the DOJ’s tracking of communications from media and congressional figures as part of its purported investigation into who was leaking classified information against President Donald Trump in 2017. Three significant bombshells about the Russia collusion hoax were hidden inside the dense and dry 100-page report.
For context, when Trump won the 2016 presidential election, anonymous Democrat operatives in the federal government and Congress began leaking like sieves as part of a coordinated effort to paint Trump as a mastermind spy who had worked with Russian President Vladimir Putin for decades in order to steal the election.
Two Washington Post stories, a New York Times story, and a CNN story were all found to have included classified information. None of the four stories are specified in the report, but they all appeared in the first half of President Trump’s first year in office.
The first Washington Post story is likely the April 2017 story by Ellen Nakashima, Devlin Barrett, and Adam Entous revealing that DOJ had gotten a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Carter Page, a Trump affiliate. The true story of that warrant would end up revealing the corruption of the DOJ, including how it falsified evidence in its application and relied on the laughable Steele dossier as the basis. But at the time of its publication, the FISA story suggested that an honorable DOJ had serious reason to suspect the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia to steal the election.
As outlandish and unhinged as the conspiracy theory was, it was fueled with daily drops of classified and deceptively packaged information designed to make it appear legitimate. The corporate media dutifully regurgitated, published, and aired the leaks as part of their campaign against the Republican president.
Nakashima, Barrett, and Entous were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their perpetuation of the Russia collusion hoax in this and other stories. The leaks, which threatened national security and were intended to get Trump removed from office, threw the White House into chaos.
For years, polling has indicated that most Democrats continued to cling to the conspiracy theory as an explanation for Trump’s first presidential victory. The leakers have never been brought to justice.
Bombshell #1: A Democrat Whistleblower Identified Schiff, Swalwell As Leakers
One of the more surprising claims in the report was that a Democrat staffer on one of the congressional committees “voluntarily told the FBI” almost immediately after the investigation began in 2017 that he suspected two members of Congress and a number of Democrat staffers of being involved in the leaking of the classified information, leading to further investigation of those identified.While the report doesn’t identify the whistleblower, his committee, or name the members of Congress, a 2021 New York Times story already identified then-Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, both of California, as the two congressmen on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) who were under investigation.
The DOJ report further notes that only these two members of Congress were investigated. Schiff was the top Democrat on HPSCI at the time its Republican chair Devin Nunes was engaged in painstaking efforts to reveal the Russia collusion hoax and many of its participants.
Both Schiff and Swalwell were notorious for going on left-wing media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC to push the Russia conspiracy theory. Schiff, now California’s junior senator, lied publicly for years about the matter, falsely claiming to have secret evidence substantiating the hoax. Schiff was widely suspected of leaking information to his allies in the press, or otherwise misrepresenting information from the committee.
Swalwell, for his part, famously had an intimate relationship with Communist Chinese spy “Fang Fang,” who had targeted him and other Democrats as part of a honey-trap operation. Despite these serious problems, both men served on HPSCI until former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy removed them in early 2023.
The whistleblower told the FBI he “suspected that Member 1 had previously leaked classified information and that Member 2 wanted to influence public opinion via the release of classified information.” However, the FBI said the whistleblower didn’t offer enough “direct evidence” of the suspected leaking.
The DOJ itself would go on to stonewall Nunes and Senate colleagues who were attempting to investigate DOJ’s lead role in the Russia collusion scam. Many of the top leadership at the FBI, including former Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, were later unveiled as some of the worst leakers in government and leaders of the Russia collusion hoax. While they were removed from office, the Biden administration later paid some of them off.
Bombshell #2: A Top Democrat Staffer Was Caught Communicating With Three Reporters Who Published the Classified Info He Had Access To, But FBI Didn’t Think It Meant Much
The IG report says the whistleblower identified a top Democrat “staffer from the same committee” as a potential leaker. The report notes that DOJ “focused its investigation on the Senior Committee Staffer as the potential source of the leak” and that beyond being identified by the whistleblower, he was someone they “suspected of being the source of the unauthorized disclosure for other reasons as well.”The DOJ was so interested in rooting out leaks of classified information, however, that it waited three full years to interview their main suspect and only after Attorney General Bill Barr apparently caused the investigation to be re-opened in 2020. One almost gets the sense that the DOJ wasn’t super-interested in stopping leaks that fed the Russia collusion hoax they ran.
The IG report doesn’t name the senior staffer, but another 2021 New York Times story identifies the suspected leaker. “[T]he leak investigation appeared to have been primarily focused on Michael Bahar, then a staff member on the House Intelligence Committee,” Russia collusion hoaxers Michael S. Schmidt and Charlie Savage wrote. “It remains unclear whether agents were pursuing a theory that Mr. Bahar had leaked on his own or whether they suspected him of talking to reporters with the approval of lawmakers. Either way, it appears they were unable to prove their suspicions that he was the source of any unauthorized disclosures; the case has been closed, and no charges were brought.”
It’s unclear if the DOJ was unable or, perhaps more likely, unwilling to go after participants in the Russia collusion hoax it helped run.
………The decision to use the leak investigation as a pretext to dig into those Republican staffers’ communications instead of tenaciously targeting Democrat leakers or taking the deluge of leaks from the DOJ itself seriously is a great example of why the DOJ needs massive reform in the next administration.
Schiff and Swalwell basically served as moles for the DOJ to spy on political opponents and subvert any attempt to uncover the truth behind the Russian collusion hoax.