President Donald Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe has warned Hillary Clinton that Special Counsel John Durham now has enough evidence for several indictments.
Ratcliffe met with Durham on multiple occasions to tell him there was enough evidence to support the indictments of “multiple people” in the Trump-Russia probe, according to Fox News.
Ratcliffe, a former congressman and former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, investigated the story while serving as DNI.
The sources who told Fox about Ratcliffe’s conclusions argue that one piece of declassified intelligence seals the deal because it shows intelligence community officials within the CIA forwarded an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton to the FBI for allegedly approving “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
Fox is reporting that sources said the CIA memo, known as a Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL), was forwarded to the FBI to the attention of the guys in charge at the time, FBI Director James Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok.
Fox says they reported on the declassified memo in 2020 but it did not resonate with the public.
But that may change considering John Durham’s bombshell Friday filing.
The memo said:
“The following information is provided for the exclusive use of your bureau for background investigative action or lead purposes as appropriate.
“This memorandum contains sensitive information that could be source revealing. It should be handled with particular attention to compartmentation and need-to-know. To avoid the possible compromise of the source, any investigative action taken in response to the information below should be coordinated in advance with Chief Counterintelligence Mission Center, Legal.
“It may not be used in any legal proceeding — including FISA applications — without prior approval.
“Per FBI verbal request, CIA provides the below examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date.
“An exchange [REDACTED] discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
Fox News has no evidence Comey took any action but Ratcliffe also declassified documents revealing former CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”
Those documents say:
“We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED].
“CITE [summarizing] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”
“Michael Sussmann’s is the first of what I would hope would be a number, based on the fact — I provided not just those declassified documents, but I provided 1,000 intelligence community documents that I think support additional charges that I would expect John Durham to bring,” Ratcliffe told host Maria Bartiromo in 2021.
“At my direction, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has now provided almost 1,000 pages of materials to the Department of Justice in response to Mr. Durham’s document requests,” Ratcliffe said at the time.
“I will continue to ensure the Intelligence Community’s responsiveness to the DOJ’s requests. We also look forward to supporting the DOJ in further declassifications consistent with their investigation. As the President has made clear, we must be appropriately transparent with the American people and give them the confidence that the extraordinary work of Intelligence professionals is never misused or politicized.”
From Fox News:
The filing also reveals that Sussmann provided “an updated set of allegations” including the Russian bank data, and additional allegations relating to Trump “to a second agency of the U.S. government” in 2017.
Durham says the allegations “relied, in part, on the purported DNS traffic” that Tech Executive-1 and others “had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s New York City apartment building, the EOP, and the aforementioned healthcare provider.”
In Sussmann’s meeting with the second U.S. government agency, Durham says he “provided data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of internet protocol (IP) addresses affiliated with a Russian mobile phone provider,” and claimed that the lookups “demonstrated Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.”
“The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations,” Durham wrote, adding that the “lookups were far from rare in the United States.”
“For example, the more complete data that Tech Executive-1 and his associates gathered–but did not provide to Agency 2–reflected that between approximately 2014 and 2017, there were a total of more than 3 million lookups of Russian Phone-Prover 1 IP addresses that originated with U.S.-based IP addresses,” Durham wrote. “Fewer than 1,000 of these lookups originated with IP addresses affiliated with Trump Tower.”
Durham added that data collected by Tech Executive-1 also found that lookups began as early as 2014, during the Obama administration and years before Trump took office, which he said, is “another fact which the allegations omitted.”
