Newly-declassified so-called Clinton Plan intelligence included intercepted communications from a George Soros ally which suggested that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Donald Trump was plotting a “long-term affair to demonize” Trump by linking him to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and that the Clinton campaign expected that “the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”
The revelations, including intercepted purported communications from Leonard Benardo, a top official at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and communications by Clinton foreign policy adviser Julianne Smith, provide new insight into information that the U.S. intelligence community received in July 2016 – just before the FBI launched its politicized Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
The bombshell allegations about a plot to falsely link Trump to Putin in an effort to distract from Clinton’s classified emails scandal are found within a formerly classified but now largely-unredacted appendix from special counsel John Durham’s 2023 report on the origins and conduct of the Russiagate investigation.
The intelligence received by the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI, included information and analysis from purported emails from Benardo which detailed an alleged plot by Smith and others, with the approval of Clinton herself.
“During the first stage of the campaign, due to lack of direct evidence, it was decided to disseminate the necessary information through the FBI-affiliated…technical structures… in particular, the Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect companies, from where the information would then be disseminated through leading U.S. publications,” the classified annex said. “The media analysis on the DNC hacking appears solid…. Julie [Campaign Advisor] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”
The purported emails added: “HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] approved [Campaign adviser Julie’s] idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. That should distract people from her own missing emails.”
“The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue… In absence of direct evidence, Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect will supply the media, and GRU [Russia’s Main Intelligence Directive] will hopefully carry on to give more facts,” the alleged emails from Benardo said.
Durham said there is evidence to believe the Clinton Plan intelligence was authentic and that the Clinton campaign did carry out such a dirty trick.
“The office’s review of certain communications involving Smith provided possible additional support … to the notion that the Clinton campaign was engaged in an effort or plan in late July 2016 to encourage scrutiny of Trump’s purported ties to Russia, and that the [Clinton] campaign might have wanted or expected the FBI or other agencies to aid that effort (‘put more oil into the fire’) by commencing a formal investigation of the DNC hack,” Durham’s classified annex stated.
The Durham classified annex also assessed that “it is a logical deduction [REDACTED] [Julianne] Smith was, at minimum, playing a role in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to tie Trump to Russia” and that the communications reviewed by the special counsel “certainly lends at least some credence that such a plan existed.”
Benardo is the senior vice president of Soros’s Open Society Foundations, founded by leftwing billionaire George Soros and now currently chaired by his son Alex Soros.
Smith was the head of the Clinton campaign’s Europe team and worked as a foreign policy advisor for the failed 2016 bid. Smith had been acting national security Advisor and deputy national security advisor to then-Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama administration, and served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO for all four years of Biden’s eventual presidency.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who made the formerly-classified information public, said on Thursday that “based on the Durham annex, the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means.”
“These intelligence reports and related records, whether true or false, were buried for years,” Grassley said. “History will show that the Obama and Biden administration’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump. This political weaponization has caused critical damage to our institutions and is one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history. The new Trump administration has a tremendous responsibility to the American people to fix the damage done and do so with maximum speed and transparency.”
The Durham declassified annex said that the “FBI was fully alerted to the possibility that at least some of the information it was receiving about the Trump campaign might have its origin either with the Clinton campaign or its supporters, or alternatively, was the product of Russian disinformation.” But the annex stated that “despite this awareness” — that it might be dealing with a Russian falsehood or alternatively with a genuine Clinton campaign dirty trick — “the FBI appears to have dismissed the [intelligence information] as not credible without any investigative steps actually having been taken to either corroborate or disprove the allegations.”
The declassified appendix added that, after Trump’s win in November 2016, it was only in 2017 that the “CIA prepared a written assessment of the authenticity and veracity of the above-referenced intelligence. The CIA stated that it did not assess that the above [REDACTED] memoranda, or [REDACTED] hacked U.S. communications, to be the product of Russian fabrications.”
The Durham annex also revealed that, besides the July 2016 Clinton Plan intelligence, the Obama administration received information from a source which was contained in two memoranda.
The January 2016 memo detailed the alleged intention by then-President Obama to scuttle the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s illicit private email server.
The March 2016 memo alleged that “[the Democratic Party’s] opposition is focused on discrediting Trump…. [a]mong other things, the Clinton staff, with support from special services, is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and the ‘Russian Mafia’.”
Durham said that FBI analysts believed that, at the time, the “special services” in the March 2016 memo could refer “to the FBI and the CIA or more broadly to the intelligence and law enforcement communities” inside the United States. But other analysts speculated that it could refer to “Trump dossier author Christopher Steele.”
