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By John Solomon
The FBI opened a criminal probe specifically targeting Donald Trump in May 2017, alleging the newly elected president may have been acting as a Russian asset when he fired then-Director James Comey even though the bureau’s own evidence overwhelmingly showed at the time there was no collusion with the Kremlin.
Internal FBI memos newly declassified by the White House show the investigation – codenamed Oxferd Comma – was launched in the immediate aftermath of Comey’s May 9, 2017 firing and was predicated on an allegation that previously released records show the bureau’s own agents had mostly dismissed.
“The FBI is opening a full investigation based on an articulable factual basis that reasonably indicates that President Donald J. Trump may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States,” the electronic communication opening the probe on May 16, 2017 stated.
“The goal of the investigation is to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States and/or a violation of federal criminal statutes,” it added. “In addition, this investigation will also seek to determine whether President Trump and others yet to be named obstructed and/or conspiracy to obstruct any associated FBI investigation.”
The memo, written by the FBI’s counterintelligence division and approved by then-FBI General Counsel James Baker and then-Assistant Director for Counterintelligence William Priestap, made clear the concerns about Russian influence and obstruction included Comey’s firing, in part because of the public explanations Trump gave for it.
“This alternative explanation can be reasonably read to imply that the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation was a factor in President Trump’s decision to terminate Comey,” the memo stated.
Both the Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were advised that the probe had been launched, the memos show.
OXFERD COMMA – FBI Informs DOJ
The FBI marked the investigation as a “sensitive investigative matter” and declared it was “the least intrusive method to address the serious national security risk posed by the activities alleged.”
But that decision proved anything but nonintrusive: it prompted the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller by Rosenstein and a nearly two-year probe that hampered the start of the Trump presidency even though Mueller’s team, like the FBI before it, was unable to substantiate any collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election.
A subsequent investigation by Special Counsel John Durham – released by the Biden Justice Department in 2023 – concluded there was no basis for the FBI to even open the original Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion.
The newly declassified Oxferd Comma memos show the case was closed on April 9, 2019, a few weeks after Mueller’s probe was sunset with a final report and no charges against Trump.
“The Special Counsel provided the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining his prosecution and declination decisions,” the closing memo noted.
OXFERD COMMA – Closing Communication
The memos are being released as federal prosecutors in Fort Pierce, Fla., reportedly investigate whether the FBI, DOJ and intelligence agencies engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Trump and his followers through repeated criminal investigations that lacked evidence of wrongdoing.
It was well known that the FBI wanted to investigate Comey’s firing by Trump as an act of obstruction and that such concerns led to Mueller’s special counsel appointment.
Records would later show Comey was fired on the merits because the DOJ believed he mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and the department’s independent inspector general would later conclude that Comey “violated long-standing department practice and protocol” with his conduct in the Clinton case.
The new FBI memos, identified and declassified by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, reveal for the first time that the FBI predicated the obstruction case against Trump – and gave it a codename — on the concern the then-president may have been an asset of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
But previously released FBI and DOJ records show the notion of Trump being a Russian asset had already been widely dismissed by agents and analysts working for months beforehand on the Crossfire Hurricane case that examined Russia-Trump collusion.
In fact, the lead agent in the Crossfire Hurricane case texted his colleague the same week that Oxferd Comma was opened suggesting he did not believe the allegations were substantiated.
“I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there,” then-Deputy Assistant Director Pete Strzok wrote FBI special counsel Lisa Page on May 19, 2017.
Strzok’s text sentiments were confirmed by another key colleague working the case, Special Agent William Barnett, who would later tell the Justice Department that by early 2017 the FBI had mostly ruled out that the Trump campaign and its various players like retired Gen. Mike Flynn or advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos had colluded with the Kremlin, according to an FBI interview report of Barnett released in 2020.
“BARNETT still did not see any evidence of collusion between the TRUMP Campaign and the Russian Government,” the summary of the agent’s interview revealed.
By the time the FBI tried to portray Trump as under Putin’s grip to justify the opening of the Oxferd Comma investigation, it had also learned that the original allegations of collusion came from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, were funneled to the FBI in a dossier written by a former British spy named Christopher Steele, who was paid by Clinton campaign’s law firm, and that the Steele dossier’s contents had mostly been uncorroborated or debunked and were part of a political dirty trick.
The first warning signs of those concerns actually emerged in late summer 2016 when CIA Director John Brennan personally briefed then-President Barack Obama and the FBI that U.S. intelligence had intercepted Clinton’s plan on or about July 26, 2016 to manufacture a scandal alleging Trump was conspiring with Russia to hijack the 2016 election.
“We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED],” Brennan notes of his conversation with Obama stated. “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.”
The intelligence made clear Clinton’s plan was to “smear” Trump, and it was shared directly with the FBI, including Comey at an Aug. 3, 2016 briefing, according to a classified annex to a DOJ report made public last year. That briefing occurred just four days after the Crossfire Hurricane probe was launched into alleged Russia collusion.
“On August 3, 2016, during a meeting at the White House, CIA Director Brennan briefed President Obama, Vice President Biden, DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey, and other U.S. officials regarding Russian interference efforts as well as the T1 intelligence received concerning the referenced plan by the Clinton campaign,” the annex noted.
Durham Annex Released by Chairman Grassley
By early 2017, well before the launch of the Oxferd Comma probe, the FBI had evaluated every statement in the Steele dossier, concluding that some were provably false and most others were either internet rumor or unable to be corroborated, according to a spreadsheet that FBI analysts created.
Some of the subsources and sources in the dossier distanced themselves from what Steele claimed they said. In fact, the FBI knew that Steele’s primary subsource, Igor Danchecnko, was suspected for years of being a Russian asset.
In an interview with the FBI in February 2017, Danchecnko claimed some of the information attributed to him in the Steele dossier was simply hearsay, according to FBI interview memos released back in 2020.
By early January 2017, the FBI also cleared another of the targets of the Russia collusion probe, then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn. “No derogatory information was reported back to the FBI,” a Jan. 4, 2017 FBI memo closing down the Flynn investigation stated.
The FBI would invite Flynn into an interview after clearing him of wrongdoing, then charged him with false statements in that interview. Their conduct with Flynn concerned some of the agents in the case, including Priestap, the FBI’s counterintelligence chief.
“What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Priestap wrote at the time.
In his interview with the FBI years later, Agent Barnett described the FBI’s investigation into Russia collusion as a misguided effort to “get Trump” that resembled a bad version of the popular game of Clue.
“BARNETT and others joked about how the investigation into collusion could be made into a game, which they referred to as ‘Collusion Clue,’” the interview summary of Barnett stated. “In the hypothetical game, investigators are able to choose any character conducting any activity, in any location, and pair this individual with another character and interpret it as evidence of collusion.”
Editor’s Note: John Solomon is on leave as Editor in Chief of Just the News while working as the chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force. He wrote this story for the White House Website, which is allowing any media to publish it.
The post FBI Secretly Opened Probe Alleging Trump Fired Comey Because He Was a Russian Asset, Declassified Memos Show appeared first on The White House.
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