Hmm: FBI Redacts Origins of RussiaGate in Final Report

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Posted on 01/07/2025 5:15:03 PM PST by SeekAndFind

Tell me the FBI needs Kash Patel without saying that the FBI needs Kash Patel. 

More than two years after filing a FOIA demand on the FBI for documents related to the Russia-collusion hoax, the bureau finally produced a six-page document detailing their probable cause for investigating Donald Trump. However, most of the document remains redacted, which means that we still don't know why Andrew McCabe made Trump a target after firing James Comey. 

Real Clear Investigations' Aaron Maté reports that the FBI wants to keep its "articulable factual basis" for probing whether Trump was a Russian agent under wraps:

As Donald Trump re-enters the White House on a pledge to end national security state overreach, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still hiding critical details on the Russia conspiracy investigation that engulfed his first term.

In response to a Freedom of Information request filed by RealClearInvestigations in August 2022, the FBI on Dec. 31, more than two years later, released a heavily redacted copy of the document that opened an explosive and unprecedented counterintelligence probe of the sitting president as an agent of the Russian government. 

The Electronic Communication, dated May 16, 2017, claimed to have an “articulable factual basis” to suspect that Trump “wittingly or unwittingly” was illegally acting on behalf of Russia, and accordingly posing “threats to the national security of the United States.” The FBI’s “goal,” it added, was “to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation.” It additionally sought to uncover whether Trump and unnamed “others” obstructed “any associated FBI investigation” – a reference to Crossfire Hurricane, the initial FBI inquiry into the Trump campaign’s suspected cooperation with an alleged Russian interference plot in the 2016 election. 

This seems particularly suspicious, given all of the information that we have since learned about Crossfire Hurricane. The probe eventually prompted Jeff Sessions to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel to continue that investigation. Mueller eventually reported that there was no basis to suspect Trump of engaging with Russian intelligence, and subsequent reviews by inspectors general revealed the politicization of the investigators, not to mention perjurious submissions to the FISA courts, especially regarding Carter Page.

Why keep this redacted, years after Crossfire Hurricane has already been exposed as a political dirty trick that was turned into lawfare to cripple a duly elected president? Aaron Maté isn't the only one wondering. Matt Taibbi wants some answers as well:

This is not a small issue. The FBI opening an investigation into a presidential candidate on the thinnest of pretexts, then continuing it despite repeated dead ends, then leaking word of an active investigation despite a total lack of results, and finally opening a second probe into a sitting president after their Director was fired, all speak to a law enforcement agency that was coloring way outside its lines, involving itself in unprecedented political interference. Whoever takes over the Bureau needs to unredact these and many other pages.

“It’s nuts,” says Maté. “Trump is in office, and they decide after he fires Comey to open a second investigation just of him, not his campaign but him, suspecting him of being a Russian agent. Why?” He pauses. “We know the pretext for the first investigation was George Papadopoulos. What’s the reason for this one? Probably the firing of Comey is in there in the redaction, but there’s got to be something else too.”

But what? Let’s hope we find out soon.

Aaaand that brings us to Kash Patel, Donald Trump's nominee for FBI Director. The Senate will soon take up that appointment, filling the upcoming vacancy that Christopher Wray's planned resignation will create. The Left has already begun freaking out over Patel's appointment, with Adam Kinzinger telling Stephen Colbert last night that it would lead to the weaponization of the FBI and/or DoJ. But it's very clear that the FBI weaponized itself in 2016 to create a 'resistance' to Trump, and that firing Comey escalated that resistance to an absurd level. 

Now the FBI doesn't want to come clean on how it started, and who was involved in it. This redaction won't last long, however, if and when Patel takes the reins at FBI. One has to wonder why the FBI even bothered to redact the document at all, given this inevitability, and wonder just how bad the full document looks ... and for whom, too. It makes clear that Patel's confirmation isn't just a desired outcome but an absolute necessity for reforming an organization whose upper echelons have been thoroughly politicized, and arguably corrupted. 

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1 posted on 01/07/2025 5:15:03 PM PST by SeekAndFind

To: SeekAndFind

2 posted on 01/07/2025 5:19:50 PM PST by DesertRhino (2016 Star Wars, 2020 The Empire Strikes Back, 2024... RETURN OF THE JEDI..)

To: SeekAndFind

3 posted on 01/07/2025 5:21:19 PM PST by struggle

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4 posted on 01/07/2025 5:21:27 PM PST by cuz1961 (Isaiah 53:3)

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5 posted on 01/07/2025 5:22:09 PM PST by eyeamok

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