Below is my column in The Hill on the news that former FBI Director James Comey has been subpoenaed in Florida as part of the Russian collusion investigation. Yes, there was a Russian collusion conspiracy, but not the one that the media relentlessly pushed during the first Trump term.
Here is the column:
This week, we learned that the probe into the Russian conspiracy theory in Florida is moving forward with the disclosure that former FBI Director James Comey has been subpoenaed. What is different in this probe is that it is pursuing the real Russia conspiracy — the creation of a false narrative to kneecap the first Trump administration.
At issue is what could be the greatest political hit job in history. Of course, the growing evidence of this conspiracy continues to be buried by one of its key components: the media. Nevertheless, the “truth will out,” and it appears to be coming out in Florida.
Headed by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, the investigation is building on information uncovered by House and Senate committees that was long buried by the Biden administration. That evidence appears to show a knowing effort to manufacture a Russian conspiracy hoax at the urging of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Ironically, the Washington Post and the New York Times received Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting promoting this Russian conspiracy hoax. The media spent years in wall-to-wall coverage of disproven allegations, including many claims made in the debunked Steele Dossier that had been secretly funded by the Clinton campaign.
The true Pulitzer Prize-worthy story was staring the media in the face the whole time: a conspiracy to create a false conspiracy narrative to elect Clinton and later to derail the Trump administration. The latter effort succeeded with help from top intelligence figures.
New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said at the time that Clinton Campaign General Counsel Marc Elias had denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier. When Vogel tried to report the story, he said, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman later wrote that “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
The key period was shortly before the 2016 election. We now know that the campaign and its surrogates shopped the conspiracy to their contacts in the Justice Department and in the media. They found eager allies.
Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Peter Strzok, a key figure in the investigation, texted FBI lawyer Lisa Page to assure her “that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected,” adding that they “can’t take that risk.” He added that they had it all in hand because “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
In fact, whether it was known to Strzok or not, there was an insurance policy in the works. In July 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
Brennan is believed to be a target of the current investigation, including possible perjury before Congress.
In reality, within days of that briefing on how Clinton would create this conspiracy theory, the investigation began, just as the Clinton campaign hoped it would.
Early on, the FBI was told by the CIA that its sources — and the Steele dossier — were unreliable. However, key FBI officials continued the surveillance and the investigation targeting the Trump campaign and key figures. One official later pleaded guilty to lying to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to continue surveillance without an evidentiary basis.
At the end of 2016, a CIA assessment found that “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent U.S. election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” That presidential daily brief was scheduled to be published on Dec. 9, 2016, but the office of James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, reportedly stopped the publication “based on some new guidance.”
Clapper later joined Obama, along with John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and others, in a meeting that would ultimately inject the debunked theory directly into the media.
A new assessment was ordered that would detail the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.” Brennan reportedly handpicked the analysts who would apparently flip the earlier assessments without any credible intelligence to justify doing so.
Brennan picked Susan Miller to head the effort, a person who admitted she was “not a Trump fan.” In later social media postings, Miller engaged in unhinged screeds like, “This is awful! Further proof that Trump is a dictator.” She also wrote, “Good grief. As if we needed proof that MAGA types are nazis…” She responded to one foreign poster by saying, “Yes….the Hitler analogy is not lost on a bunch of us … sadly.”
Back in 2016, the rewritten assessment was quickly leaked to an eagerly awaiting media. It was the perfect hit job carried out by top Obama administration officials at the very end of their time in power .
In testimony on May 23, 2017, Brennan claimed that the Steele dossier “wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done.”
Yet the declassified material appears to contradict that sworn statement. Brennan allegedly not only discussed the dossier but also insisted upon its inclusion in the new assessment Obama had requested.
Brennan and his handpicked team went to extraordinary lengths to revive the conspiracy theory that they knew was the original objective of the Clinton campaign.
Analysts complained that the reliance on the Steele Dossier “ran counter to fundamental tradecraft principles and ultimately undermined the credibility of a key judgment.” One CIA analyst told investigators that Brennan “refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier’s main flaws, [Brennan] responded, ‘Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?’”
Keep in mind that Obama ordered the new assessment at the very end of his term. There was a rush to complete the report before Trump took office after defeating Clinton. The effort seeded the Russian collusion hoax that would go on to consume much of Trump’s first term.
In other words, the scheme worked. But it required Brennan’s involvement, as well as that of others, including allegedly then-FBI Director James Comey. It also needed a fully invested media.
None of this will get anyone a Pulitzer, because the politics is wrong. However, it might just force the truth into the open. With Democrats promising to resume impeachments and investigations if they retake power in the midterms, it would be useful for the public to have a full understanding of what actually occurred last time.
It is time for the public to learn whether top Obama officials and the media pulled off the greatest political hoax in history.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
State bar associations have been derelict in failing to pull the law licenses of those involved. Brennan, Clapper and Comey belong in jail; hopefully there will be some accountability. Instead Brennon and others are being highly paid by MSNOW to spew their lies and invective.
Bar associations cannot revoke a law license.
Only a court can revoke law licenses
Totally wrong. Don’t post things that you know nothing about.
“[The] greatest political hit job in history,” you say?
________________________________________________________
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
– Barack Obama
___________________
“We will stop him.”
– Peter Strzok to FBI paramour Lisa Page
_____________________________________________
“[Obama] wants to know everything we’re doing.”
– Lisa Page to FBI paramour Peter Strzok
_____________________________________________
“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before 40.”
– Peter Strzok to FBI parmour Lisa Page
____________________________________________
“People on the 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this [Trump] server.”
– Bill Priestap
_________________
“I had a discussion with the case team and we believe there to be predication to include former President of the United States Donald J. Trump as a predicated subject.”
– Timothy Thibault to John Crabb, U.S. Attorney’s Office, D.C.
___________________________________________________________________
The Obama Coup D’etat in America is the most egregious abuse of power and the most prodigious crime in American political history. The co-conspirators are:
Kevin Clinesmith, Bill Taylor, Eric Ciaramella, Rosenstein, Mueller/Team, Andrew Weissmann,
James Comey, Christopher Wray, McCabe, Strozk, Page, Laycock, Kadzic, Sally Yates,
James Baker, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, Priestap, Kortan, Campbell, Sir Richard Dearlove,
Christopher Steele, Simpson, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, Stefan “The Walrus” Halper,
Azra Turk, Kerry, Hillary, Huma, Mills, Brennan, Gina Haspel, Clapper, Lerner, Farkas, Power,
Lynch, Rice, Jarrett, Holder, Brazile, Sessions (patsy), Nadler, Schiff, Pelosi, Obama,
Joe Biden, James E. Boasberg, Emmet Sullivan, Gen. Milley, George Soros, John McCain,
Marc Elias, Igor Danchenko, Fiona Hill, Charles H. Dolan, Jake Sullivan, Strobe Talbot,
Cody Shear, Victoria Nuland, Ray “Red Hat” Epps, Don Berlin, Kathy Ruemmler, Rodney Joffe,
Paul Vixie, L. Jean Camp, Andrew Whitney, Lisa O. Monaco, Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg,
Matthew Colangelo, Merrick Garland, Juan Merchan, Timothy Thibault et al.
We were not adequately told then what an ominous threat to representative democracy the leadership of the Democrat Party was. Even now in many real time cases that leadership persists in defying the will and intentions of the majority of American voters, even a majority among their own party.
Ron A. Hoffman,
The majority of Americans want Voter ID, to include 71% of Democrat voters, yet the party leaders refuse to even consider it and spread lies and gaslighting about how it will disenfranchise women. That is demonstratively false.
The SAVES Act could have specified that each State is obliged to screen out ineligible voters, while guaranteeing EVERY eligible voter is certified able to vote by election day. They omitted the 2nd part.
Instead, they put it on the individual to get certified as eligible, but didn’t set a deadline for the State legally obligating good faith and timeliness. They could have penalized a STATE for failing to certify an eligible voter.
They didn’t.
Knowing how bureaucracies work, especially those under orders from partisan officials seeking a win for their Party by any means…..you can assume some eligible voters will not be certified on time to vote. It could be never had a drivers license, name just legally changed due to marriage or divorce, never got a passport.
Could the Bill be amended? Yes. But there’s barely time to mandate the States to implement SAVE Act for November. Is there anything unfair about making certain a more secure Voting System doesn’t exclude any eligible voters?
Will anything come of it? I doubt it. Glad it’s happening, but most have already made up their minds. Our media are a disgrace, they gave the Clinton and Ollie North hearings full broadcast on every channel at one time. We are in a very bad way in this country and it is almost entirely the modern, globalist, left’s fault. I have a great aunt who to this day still believes Trump is a Russian agent. There is no cure for TDS, and represents a larger mindset and a larger problem. Our Republic hangs by a thread, and that it is largely due to citizen reticence is just sad. Very sad.
James,
TDS, no, there is no cure. It is cult like thinking. Despite all the lawfare, the lies and gaslighting from both the DNC and MSM, they will not question the narrative that is being presented to them. And even when proven false, wrong, they cling on to the old false or wrong narrative.
Turley– “Ironically, the Washington Post and the New York Times received Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting promoting this Russian conspiracy hoax.”
Maybe not so ironic. The Pulitzer, like the Oscar and the Nobel, have been shamelessly degraded to the point that getting one is an embarrassment that should be hidden in the basement rather than proudly displayed on a shelf.
On another embarrassment, this case likely would never see the light of day in the politicized and morally corrupted DC courts that operate like a litter box where all the crap and stink gets buried.
Looking forward to Marc Elias being subpoenaed
Maybe the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp will get a fresh batch of Inmates!
George – THE LIST please…
After all, One can only wish for the best…
You know the news is bad in magat land when Turls drags this push piece type trash back again.
Repeat after me, magats…yes, the Russians sided, and side, with trump. The Steele dossier began as R inter party opo against trump before hrc picked it up when he won the ’16 primary.
Yes, trump’s campaign worked with Russian intelligence to target disinformation.
Trump is a Russian asset.
Turls is a trump asset.
Party on!!
It’s time for your meds, dear.
Oh my…, the truth hurts so much you have no recourse other than going immediately to insult gaslighting.
But it fits you well in a really cautionary way. So there’s that.
Turls=juvenile living in mom’s basement who never had a date, never had a job, never had a car and still uses acne cream.
Thanks for reading , slobby. You couldn’t be more off in your judgements but it’s cute seeing you try to sound relevant.
Losing really dives you bat-crazy.
And you and Biden are a CCP asset, US intel hid Chinese 2020 election meddling from Trump because they opposed his policies, memo says
https://justthenews.com/government/security/analysts-hid-chinese-2020-meddling-intel-vulgarian-trump-over-opposing-his
The “Steele Dossier” was not the impetus for the investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russians–Turley, as a MAGA mouthpiece, keeps trying to say that it was–that is NOT TRUE. That is a lie that MAGA media keeps on repeating. The “Steele Dossier” was started by a Republican opponent of Trump named Singer, who turned over the information he obtained to Hillary’s campaign after Trump got the nomination. The investigation started as a result of a report by an Australian diplomat that Russia had information about Hillary Clinton that it would use to try to defeat her:
“Former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, in an extensive interview, spoke out on his mysterious role in triggering the launch of the Trump-Russia probe — while seeming to push back on suggestions that his fateful 2016 meeting with then-Trump adviser George Papadopoulos was somehow a set-up.
In an interview with Sky News earlier this week, Downer discussed the meeting between himself and Papadopoulos in London in May 2016, where the young Trump aide had mentioned how Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. The diplomat later told the Americans, which reportedly helped prompt the FBI probe.”
Here’s a small snippet from a Wikipedia piece about the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia:
“The investigation concluded in March 2019. The report concluded that the Russian Internet Research Agency’s social media campaign supported Trump’s presidential candidacy while attacking Clinton’s, and Russian intelligence hacked and released damaging material from the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations.[16] The investigation “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign”, and determined that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally” from Russian hacking efforts. ”
Turley cites NO actual evidence to back up his adoption of Trump’s “hoax” rhetoric, and Turley’s endless use of qualifiers such as “could be” and “appears to show a knowing effort to manufacture a Russian conspiracy hoax” is literally shameful. That’s the kind of language that is used when you KNOW you DON’T have actual proof. But, that’s not what Turley was paid to write. Putin was afraid of Hillary. Putin OWNS Trump, and some of us want to know why. We know that the Epstein files were hacked–does Putin have the goods on Trump, and is that why Trump lifted sanctions so that Russia can make billions selling its petroleum since Trump’s war on Iran caused the Strait of Hormuz to be shut down, despite the fact that Russia is helping Iran by disclosing locations where they can bomb our military?
Meanwhile, it’s obvious that Trump sees the ICE thugs as his private army to deploy whenever and wherever he wants to do anything he wants–now, he’s sending them to airports because of the backlog of travelers needing to get through security checkpoints, all due to Republicans’ refusal to pass a Democrat bill to fund TSA but not ICE and border patrol. ICE thugs are not qualified to do airport screenings. Yeah, Trump and Repubicans will fight to get taxpayer money to fund ICE even though the majority of Americans oppose their tactics, even if it means that travelers have to wait for hours in TSA lines and some have to abandon plans for a spring break trip.
To beat the dead horse further, this whole scheme only works in a country where the capacity for self‑government has already atrophied. The ceiling on what the permanent security and intelligence class can pull off is inversely proportional to that capacity, and ours is scraping the floor right now.
OLLY,
True.
Who do we have to blame?
Public education?
Parents teaching a degree of history at home? Of course, watching what is happening over in the EU with parents being accused of religious extremism, or not allowing their 5 year old to “trans” is child abuse and something similar here in the states, I would not put it past some to claim teaching anything at home as “extremism.”
Joe Biden was the worst POTUS in the history of the US. And, without doubt, the person that served as the greatest threat to the US as POTUS was Barack Obama.
Jeff Sessions and his staff said it was right and just.
Bigger than Watergate and all the up to the big reptile…
Watergate was a tawdry political espionage operation that Nixon thought he could dismiss. It turned into a hatchet job on both his reputation and his not-too-bad administration.
I’ve been sharing this statement for many years now…
It seems to me that the political left has been going out of its way to prove my statement correct in every way.
When AG Jeff Sessions took the Democrat bait and rescued himself, then….
Outstanding Essay!!!
There a big, important question at stake here:
Does the 1st Amendment go so far as allowing political actors to deliberately dupe the public as a “protected” form of political communication? The ones who’ve pushed out whoppers (Hillary Clinton, Brennan, Biden, Blinken, Morrell) all think so.
But how does that square with government deriving its legitimacy from “the consent of the governed”? If that consent is obtained through trickery and deceit, what remains of legitimacy? Therefore, common sense suggests that a Republic such as ours have a means of imposing authenticity and honesty upon candidates, office holders and the media. And, that doesn’t mean lawfare (a violation of 1A). It means lightning-fast-paced civil lawsuits to expose the whopper before it can gain traction. It calls for Public Frauds lawsuits, similar in Constitutional pedigree to Defamation lawsuits, but engineered to work at the pace of modern communications.
We don’t allow duping the public where a party is injured by waging a deliberate falsehood (i.e. defamation). Why should we tolerate duping the public for political advantage? The affront is to the public at large. Why require private injury?
Pbinca,
“Why should we tolerate duping the public for political advantage?”
That is a great question.
Seems HRC, Comey, Strzok, Brennan, Obama, et al. thought or think they are above any such standard or expectation. A complicit media does not help.
Right. After we establish Public Frauds lawsuits, any media org that knowingly runs with falsehoods pushed out for political effect could be named in the same lawsuit with the originators.
To historians of political events, this comes as no surprise. Back in the early 1970s, Mark Felt, the FBI’s Deputy Director under Hoover, was a key informant for Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein. Each time Felt met his reporter pals, he divulged secret grand jury information, each time that being a felony punishable by prison. Does anyone think that the FBI’s #2 didn’t have the blessing of the FBI’s #1 to perform what later would be referred to as “otherwise criminal activities” in divulging Rule 6(e) grand jury info? The result back then was regime-change, FBI-style.
So now we have another grand jury looking into a more complex scheme formed to effect the regime-change of the first Trump administration and, once again, the FBI is at the center of the inquiry. The important thing now is not to focus just on who appears before the grand jury, but who does not. Assume those who do not appear have received target letters advising them that they are being investigated by a federal grand jury for wrongdoing.
These letters generally serve two purposes: the first is to inform the target of her Fifth Amendment rights, and the second is to provide a subtle hint (read “offer”) that cooperation with the government may permit a target to become a witness, a key difference that is well-known and understood by all the players and their attorneys in this drama. Comey may have decided to change his status after getting his target letter. His “otherwise criminal activities” in pursuit of regime-change are no longer protected, assuming that is, that they ever were protected in the first place.
The first witnesses to be called to a grand jury typically are the “little people,” those who have bits and pieces of the conspiracy and little or no reason to fabricate or avoid answering questions. As “witnesses,” they cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment to protect someone else, only themselves, and only if they believe and claim that they have liability. If so, they can be granted limited-use immunity and forced to testify or face contempt and possible jail time. A grand jury investigation is like a musical piece that moves slowly toward a crescendo, with the main players and their instruments called to perform the grand finale.
JJC,
Thank you for your legal analysis and insight. In this case, you comment makes for interesting reading.
The ‘evidence’ contained inside the ‘Burn Bags” will also substantiate Who, What, When ,Where, Why.
Here is more Democrat lawfare post the 2020 Election.
This article is excellent in that it covers not only the enitre history of elections, electors, certification the constitutionan and the law etc. that is CONSTANTLY being denied by those on the left here. But also points out that in the case of Wisconsin that all this was done OPENLY and that the democrat AG who has been prosecuting Trump lawyers not only was aware and did not object,
but actually argued to courts that they should NOT entertain election challenges – because the proper constitutional way to do so was by presenting a separate slate of electors and having Congress sort it out.
The blatant hypocracy of the left.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/03/23/wisconsin_ag_josh_kaul_steamrolls_democracy_153961.html
Amazing read. It’s worse than hypocrisy. What that article alleges Josh Kaul did is evil.
Yes, anon, it isn’t common crime nor common criminals. Its destruction rises to the level of evil.
More related Biden era Malfeasance
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/03/20/trump_ally_michael_caputo_says_fbi_investigation_into_him_and_others_spanned_entire_biden_presidency.html
Now that Robert Mueller (Frm. FBI Dir.) has effectively Clintoned-Out, it’s time to open Pandora’s Box and see what’s there.
IT’S THERE ALL RIGHT! – But will it be Seen?
Just a reminder: There are No-Consequences inside the Washington D.C. Greenbelt.
Pundits and the media are giving Mueller the treatment John McCain received during the Keating Five scandal — meritorious service in Vietnam should cancel out subsequent malfeasance in office for a lifetime, so HOW DARE Trump say he’s glad Mueller is dead?
Here is the “Official” New York Times Narrative:
What Was the Mueller Investigation? And What Did It Find?
“… Mr. Mueller submitted his report in March 2019. It concluded that Russia had carried out a sweeping and systematic effort to interfere in the election, and that the Trump campaign expected it would benefit electorally from those efforts. The investigation did not establish that members of the campaign had conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities, the Justice Department concluded. …”
By: Mark Walker, Aimee Ortiz – NYT ~ March 21, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/us/politics/robert-mueller-trump-russia-fbi-investigation.html