Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia, was based on such weak “evidence” that a former FBI executive says it should have never been opened up “in a million years.”
A newly declassified memo dated July 31, 2016, which launched the entire investigation, was not based on any evidence of wrongdoing by members of the Trump campaign. As John Solomon at Just The News observes, the investigation was opened based on “a third-hand ‘suggestion’ of wrongdoing and the thinnest of suspicions that illegal foreign lobbying had occurred.” The memo makes clear that the criminal basis for Operation Crossfire Hurricane was suspected violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but the memo does not identify a single incident showing the law was violated.
Rather [the memo] focused on a “suggestion” passed on by Australian ambassador Alexander Downer that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos might be coordinating with Russia the release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
Downer had heard the information about the Russians during a bar conversation in May 2016 from Papadopoulos, who had heard it two months earlier from a European professor who had heard it from Russians allegedly.
The memo shows the case agent, Peter Strzok, expressed some doubts and reservations about the limitations of the evidence even as he opened the probe.
“There is nothing in the [electronic communication] that meets the traditional thresholds for opening up a [Foreign Agents Registration Act] or [counterintelligence] investigation,” Kevin Brock, the former chief of intelligence for the FBI, told Just the News. “It appears hastily constructed.”
According to Brock, there are other red flags contained in the memo, including Peter Strzok’s drafting and approving the opening of his own investigation and segregating the memo, preventing interagency oversight.
When asked by Just The News if he would have approved the opening of Crossfire Hurricane based on the memo, Brock said he would not have. “Not in a million years. I wouldn’t have approved it as a squad supervisor either. This would have set off alarm bells in any FBI field for not meeting our standards for a predicate.”
The memo was obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch.
The memo shows “there was no serious basis for the Obama administration to launch an unprecedented spy operation on the Trump campaign,” says Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Wach. “We now have more proof that Crossfire Hurricane was a scam, based on absurd gossip and innuendo. This document is Exhibit A to Obamagate, the worst corruption scandal in American history.”
Fitton added, “This document shows how Attorney General Barr and U.S. Attorney Durham are right to question the predicate of this spy operation.”
So why would FBI agents have opened up an investigation based on the weakest of evidence into a presidential candidate, who was also a major critic of the sitting president at the time? It is quite clear that Obama’s FBI wanted to surveil the Trump campaign and was fishing for any excuse to do so. This latest evidence helps explain why the Obama administration applied for a FISA warrant against the Trump campaign even though they knew the Steele dossier they were relying on was based on Russian disinformation. This explains why the investigation persisted despite the fact it never found any empirical evidence of collusion. This also helps explain why Obama’s CIA director suppressed intelligence that actually showed that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win.
How does the FBI, which previously had a reputation for being unbiased and professional, launch such a poorly justified investigation of a presidential candidate? The answer, it seems, is obvious.
According to Obama’s DNI James Clapper, Barack Obama is responsible for starting the Trump/Russia investigations, and text messages from Peter Strzok to his lover Lisa Page indicated that the investigation was being run out of the White House. In short, the once famously independent FBI became a politicized weapon of Barack Obama, who wanted “to know everything” about what going on with the investigation, and was aware of critical details of this investigation.
Barack Obama wanted to destroy Donald Trump, and he weaponized the federal government to make that happen, forcing a poorly-justified investigation that never would have passed muster under normal circumstances.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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