Op-Ed: Its Trumps last chance to declassify these secrets of the Russia collusion dud – The Center Square

President Trumps last days in office offer a final opportunity to declassify critical information on the Russia investigation that engulfed his lone term.

Voluminous public records including investigative reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Congress and the Justice Departments inspector general have established that Trump and his associates were targeted with a baseless Russian collusion allegation. The fraudulent claim originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign, was fueled by a torrent of false or deceptive intelligence leaks, and was improperly investigated by the FBI, potentially to the point of being criminal. Despite these disclosures, key questions remain about the origins and the spread of the conspiracy theory.

Before he leaves office on Jan. 20, Trump could use his declassification authority to help clear up some critical issues of the Russiagate saga.

A version of this piece initially appeared Jan. 10 at RealClearInvestigations.com

The FBI says it opened its Trump-Russia investigation on July 31, 2016 after learning of a potential offer of Russian assistance to junior Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos. It later emerged that the offer came from a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud, whom U.S. officials have suggested was acting as a Russian cutout.

Muellers team depicted Mifsud as having extensive contacts with Russia. Yet Mifsuds closest public ties had been to Western governments, politicians, and institutions, including the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence services. Despite Mifsuds central role in the investigation, the FBI conducted only one brief interview with him in February 2017. The Mueller team later claimed that Mifsud gave false statements to FBI agents yet, conspicuously, did not indict him for lying. The FBIs notes on the interview show that Mifsud denied having any advance knowledge of Russian hacking.

Why didnt the FBI grill Mifsud about his sources, methods and contacts? What other efforts, if any, were made to surveil him?

A highly placed Kremlin mole was the main source of the core claim in CIA Director John Brennans hastily produced 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help defeat Clinton and support Trump.

The ICAs claim was widely portrayed as the consensus view of U.S. spy agencies, but in reality it was the conclusion drawn by a small group of CIA analysts, closely managed by then-Director Brennan. Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations revealed that Brennan overruled two senior analysts who disagreed with it.

Multiple outlets have already outed the mole, Oleg Smolenkov, and the circumstances of his exit from Russia in June 2017. This supposed betrayer of the Kremlins secrets was found to be living under his own name in a Virginia suburb.

After the FBIs collusion probe got underway in July 2016, it purportedly did not rely on the Steele dossier, a series of opposition-research memos prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. In his testimony to Congress in July 2019, Mueller claimed that the dossier was outside my purview.

Yet the FBI did extensively rely on the Steele dossier, most egregiously to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

There may be more evidence, as suggested in recently declassified documents, that the Steele material played a bigger role in the Mueller investigation than previously known. Further declassification could shed additional light on whether Muellers disavowal of Steele aligns with the conduct of his investigators.

In June 2016, CrowdStrike, a private company, accused Russian government hackers of infiltrating the Democratic National Committees servers. This assessment was presented as direct evidence of Russian interference in the presidential election and was later endorsed by the FBI and Muellers team.

CrowdStrikes highly consequential allegation has been contradicted by subsequent disclosures. Like Steele, CrowdStrike was a Democratic Party contractor whose version of events dovetailed with the Clintons campaigns apparent desire to muddy Trump with Russia connections. In a stunning admission, U.S. prosecutors told a court in June 2019 that CrowdStrike had submitted reports of a forensic analysis of its servers to the government in draft, redacted form.

The Crowdstrike reports would indicate whether the FBI and Muellers team were on solid ground in asserting Russia hacked the DNC and stole its emails.

Given the importance of the hacking allegation, and if its evidence is non-classified, why shouldnt Trump direct the U.S. intelligence community to release all of it?

The January 2017 ICA assessed with high confidence that a Russian intelligence agency, the GRU, used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release the stolen DNC files. In its July 2018 indictment of GRU officers, the Mueller team also strongly suggested that Guccifer transferred the stolen DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

The special counsels final report, issued in March 2019, quietly acknowledged that it cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries an admission that it has no hard evidence that Guccifer 2.0 was WikiLeaks source. It does not identify who those intermediaries might have been. Also missing from Muellers account is the evidence used to identify Guccifer 2.0 as a Russian intelligence front.

The Russia investigation remains a bitterly partisan issue, but its worth remembering that in November 2016, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta called on the U.S. government to declassify information around Russias roles in the election and to make this data available to the public. His purposes were different, of course. Nonetheless, disclosing such information now would give Americans a fair understanding of an unprecedented investigation into a sitting president as well as the conduct of the intelligence officials who it carried out.

This article was adapted from RealClearInvestigations.

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Op-Ed: Its Trumps last chance to declassify these secrets of the Russia collusion dud - The Center Square