There is a lot of talk about whether former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper are protected by a statute of limitations in their roles in fabricating the Russia hoax.
But, as current CIA director John Ratcliffe pointed out, “The statute of limitations doesn’t start to run until the last act in the furtherance of that conspiracy,” and the two Russia hoaxers just restarted the clock on July 30, when they decided to pen an op-ed in The New York Times filled with even more lies in an apparent cover-up.
As The Federalist reported, the lie that then-candidate Donald Trump was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “preferred” White House occupant was largely built on a six-word sentence fragment that had numerous possible interpretations and was lifted from an unreliable source.
That did not matter to Brennan or Clapper. The Obama administration had to get Trump, so they manufactured a lie that would effectively steal a fully operational presidency from the American people.
“There was no peaceful transfer of power in 2017,” as The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood wrote, because Clapper, Brennan, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey, and apparently Obama himself, were hellbent on using the American intelligence apparatus to backfill validity into fake Hillary Clinton campaign opposition research.
But it was not just dirty tricks in order to rig an election. The hoax, peddled dutifully by the corrupt co-conspirators in the corporate media for years, hung like an albatross over Trump’s first term, shredding the right of Americans to have the president for whom they voted.
On Wednesday, Brennan and Clapper once again tried to pull the wool over the eyes of Americans by claiming that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, actually their scheme was totally above board.
Their panicked diatribe was in response to DNI Tulsi Gabbard releasing records showing no underlying credible impetus for connecting Trump to Russia, and that the lie was pushed heavily by the likes of Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others over the heads of career intelligence officers warning them of the lack of credibility.
In their op-ed, Brennan and Clapper falsely claimed that the infamous “Steele dossier,” which is a document filled with fabrications and slander against Trump purchased by the Clinton campaign, was never included as a source for their Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) scheme.
“We have testified under oath, and the reviews of the assessment have confirmed, that the dossier was not used as a source or taken into account for any of its analysis or conclusions,” they wrote.
Except that is not true. Sure, they testified as much under oath. In 2017, Brennan testified that the dossier was “not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment.”
But the Steele dossier was the foundation of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, as well as being the basis for illegally obtaining a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign official Carter Page.
The report declassified by Gabbard last week details the dossier’s inclusion in the main body of the ICA, and further states that “by devoting nearly two pages of ICA text to summarizing the dossier in a high-profile assessment intended for the President and President-elect, the ICA misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports. The ICA referred to the dossier as ‘Russian plans and intentions,’ falsely implying to high-level US policymakers that the dossier had intelligence value for understanding Moscow’s influence operations.”
Brennan and Clapper’s op-ed may not be under oath, but it advances lies they told under oath.
When asked about restarting the clock on any kind of statute of limitations that could protect them, White House spokesman Davis Ingle told The Federalist, “John Brennan and James Clapper are known liars and are digging themselves into an even deeper hole. President Trump is appreciative of [Director] Gabbard and Ratcliffe’s commitment to transparency and ending the weaponization of government against Americans.”
Noting that he does not “think statute of limitations are going to impact” the ability to prosecute Brennan, Clapper, and others, Ratcliffe said that “part of why this is so important is that the people behind this are still furthering the conspiracy.”
“They conspired against President Trump, they conspired against the American people. So, I’ll leave it to Pam Bondi and our DOJ and Kash Patel and our FBI to investigate the conspiracy to do what, and what charges that they’re capable of bringing,” he added.
Gabbard has already referred documentation of the Obama officials’ conduct to the Department of Justice to be pursued as a criminal matter.
Breccan F. Thies is a correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
