Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says that former President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and others in Obama’s national security and intelligence apparatus were aware of the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign’s efforts to “infiltrate” internet servers at Trump Tower and then at the White House after Donald Trump beat her.
What’s more, Ratcliffe says that special counsel John Durham has found enough evidence to indict “multiple” people in relation to his ongoing investigation into the origins of the ‘Russiagate’ counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign during Obama’s final year in office, the Daily Mail reported Monday.
The outlet notes:
Ratcliffe said former CIA Director John Brennan told Obama and the then-president and Vice President Biden in 2016 about allegations Clinton was trying to fabricate Trump’s links to Russia to distract from the scandal over her deleted emails.
The former DNI also told Fox News Digital on Monday there is ‘enough evidence’ to indict ‘multiple people’ in Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation into ex-President Doanld Trump.
It follows Durham’s bombshell claims in legal filings over the weekend that Clinton’s campaign paid a firm to target servers in Trump Tower to create a fake scandal while he was still in office.
Clinton allegedly approved in the 2016 election ‘a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server,’ according to a CIA Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL) first revealed when a heavily-redacted version became declassified in October 2020.
On Monday morning, Trump issued a brief statement about Durham’s findings.
“I was proven right about the spying, and I will be proven right about 2020!” he said.
Ratcliffe made his remarks during an interview with Fox News earlier in the day.
“What did John Brennan tell President Obama in the Oval Office in 2016?” anchor Bill Hemmer asked.
“Well, I can talk about this because this part has been declassified,” Ratcliffe, who was serving as a Republican congressman from Texas when he agreed to serve as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, began.
“He briefed President Obama and Vice President Biden and other members of the national security team about this specific intelligence that John Durham now has about a Hillary Clinton plan to falsely accuse and vilify Donald Trump with a scandal, and the discussion around that and whether or not it was good intelligence,” he continued.
“And so everything that happened after that is one of the reasons that John Durham is investigating,” Ratcliffe said. “Those are the issues that John Durham is looking at and I think there will be many more.
“I would expect there to be quite a few more indictments because of that. There wasn’t a proper predicate to begin that investigation and John Durham has said that publicly already,” Ratcliffe noted.
The Daily Mail adds:
Brennan was questioned by Special Counsel John Durham’s team for eight hours in August 2020 as part of the ongoing investigation, specifically focusing on whether the former CIA director pushed for a more blunt assessment of Russia’s motivations.
Ratcliffe told Durham, sources told Fox News, that the indictments could be connected to Clinton’s lawyers hacking Trump’s servers to try and fabricate ties to his campaign and the Kremlin in order to distract from her own email scandal.
A source familiar with the matter told Fox that Ratcliffe has privately raised concerns regarding the CIOL directing its memo specifically to Comey and Strzok.
Ratcliffe met with Durham more than once and shared his assessment that multiple people can be charged with a crime in the events that ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment, in which he was acquitted by the Senate.
According to Fox News, which first reported on Durham’s filing:
Durham filed a motion on Feb. 11 focused on potential conflicts of interest related to the representation of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, who has been charged with making a false statement to a federal agent. Sussman has pleaded not guilty.
The indictment against Sussman says he told then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016, less than two months before the 2016 presidential election, that he was not doing work “for any client” when he requested and held a meeting in which he presented “purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel” between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin.
In the Feb. 11 filing under a section titled “Factual Background,” Durham said that Sussman “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign.”
The filing noted that Sussman’s “billing records reflect” that he “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations.”
It also showed that Tech Executive 1 and Sussman met and talked to another law partner, who was serving as General Counsel to the Clinton campaign. That attorney, sources said, is Marc Elias, who worked at the law firm Perkins Coie, which reportedly commissioned the discredited “Steele Dossier.”
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