How the CIA Engineered the “Russian Collusion” Coup d’État to Remove Donald Trump from the Presidency
Guest post by Jerome R. Corsi
As the FBI is forced to disclose additional documents on their “Crossfire Hurricane” counterintelligence investigation, the Hillary Clinton “Russian Collusion” disinformation campaign is collapsing, making it clear the CIA was at the center of an intelligence agency coup d’état operation aimed at removing Donald Trump from the presidency.
Newly released FBI documents make clear that the FBI had possession of, but never examined, two of Seth Rich’s laptops. Instead of examining the laptops in an FBI lab, the FBI turned the laptops over to CrowdStrike. The Mueller prosecutors relied upon a three-page “forensic report” that CrowdStrike prepared for the FBI, arguing Seth Rich was not the source who leaked the DNC emails to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election.
The Mueller Report blamed Guccifer 2.0 for stealing the DNC emails based again on a report first disclosed by the Washington Post on June 14, 2016. That story asserted that Russian government hackers had penetrated the DNC computer network, gaining access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP candidates. In my 2022 book, Coup d’État: Exposing Deep State Treason, I document that Guccifer 2.0 hacked only the NGP VAN created by two Democratic computer experts, Nathaniel G. Pearlman and Mark Sullivan. All Democratic Party candidates in 2016 used the same NGP VAN system to build their own voter and donor databases. That year, the NGP system operated out of Washington, D.C., and was used exclusively to manage donor contributions. The VAN system operated out of Somerville, Massachusetts, and was used primarily to manage voter data. The source for the Washington Post story on June 14, 2016, was Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike, a former head of the FBI’s cyber division. CrowdStrike was the cybersecurity firm the DNC hired to examine the hack of the DNC computers. In 2016, Google Capital, then known as “CapitalG,” the investment arm of Alphabet Inc, invested $100 million in the then-startup company CrowdStrike. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet Inc., is well-known to be a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton and an active donor to the Democratic Party. In 2016, while chairman of Alphabet, Schmidt was also working inside Clinton’s presidential campaign to organize its computer-driven get-out-the-vote effort.
The DNC emails were kept on a separate server at the DNC headquarters in Washington. There is no evidence Guccifer 2.0 had any access to the emails concerning DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz that WikiLeaks began publishing on Friday, July 22, 2016, or to the John Podesta emails that WikiLeaks began publishing on October 7, 2016. Seth Rich, an I.T. specialist working for the DNC at the DNC headquarters in Washington, had access to the DNC server from which the WikiLeaks emails were stolen. The Mueller Report clearly states on page four that Guccifer 2.0 was a “fictitious online persona” created by the GRU, i.e., Russian military intelligence.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA intelligence analyst, has recently demonstrated that an analysis of the metadata in Guccifer 2.0’s Internet posts strongly suggests Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of the CIA. Johnson argues that the CIA placed the metadata in the Guccifer 2.0 posts to establish the basis for CrowdStrike’s conclusion that Guccifer 2.0 was the Russian intelligence agent who stole the DNC emails. Johnson cites the analysis of an independent forensic computer investigator, who uses the name “The Forensicator,” who examined the Guccifer 2.0 metadata and found that Guccifer 2.0 published a file on September 13, 2016, that was copied initially on July 5, 2016, at approximately 6:45 PM Eastern Time. That file was copied and appeared as the “NGP VAN” zip file, confirming that Guccifer 2.0 hack was on the NGP VAN server, not the DNC email server and that the hack originated somewhere on the East Coast of the United States, not Russia. As reported by Patrick Lawrence in The Nation on August 9, 2017, The Forensicator determined that 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took eighty-seven seconds. Transferring this quantity of data at this short transfer time yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second. “No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed,” Lawrence wrote.
In January 2016, John Brennan organized a secret “Donald Trump Task Force” in the CIA, with the blessing of James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence. Brennan organized the Donald Trump Task Force on the premise that Trump was a spy, an asset of Putin running for president in the United States. The Task Force members, including officials from the FBI and NSA, were handpicked, with no posting of jobs. As a counterintelligence operation, Brennan’s Task Force could recruit foreign intelligence agencies, including MI-6 in the U.K., as well as Italian and Australian intelligence agencies. The Task Force spent CIA money to fund travel overseas and to pay cooperating assets to set up entrapment schemes of Trump campaign officials, including Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Out of Brennan’s clandestine Donald Trump Task Force, the Justice Department officially commenced Operation Crossfire Hurricane. On July 31, 2016, the FBI formally commenced Crossfire Hurricane as a counterintelligence operation. Under the DOJ’s counterintelligence authority, the DOJ could send FBI officials overseas on FBI official business to work hand-in-hand with their CIA, U.K., Italian, and Australian intelligence counterparts recruited into the international “Stop Trump” movement.
The Steele dossier was key to CIA director John Brennan’s decision to create an interagency “fusion cell” tasked in mid-2016 to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election. This highly secretive ad hoc group initially reported only to Obama. The group, known informally as the “fusion cell,” produced a series of papers for the White House on Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 presidential election. Agendas for the secret interagency task force meetings during the summer and fall of 2016 were sent in envelopes to FBI Director James Comey, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. A classified 2016 document that Brennan had hand-delivered to Obama in a sealed envelope contained information from someone Brennan described only as “a source close to Putin.” The informant is believed to have been a Russian source that Brennan recycled from the Steele dossier. Gradually, Brennan expanded the circle within the Obama administration to include Vice President Joe Biden. Various cabinet members, including Secretary of State John Kerry, began receiving sealed envelopes disclosing the “fusion cell” meeting agenda. The envelopes containing the agendas were considered so secret that subordinates were not authorized to open the envelopes. Sometimes the agendas were withheld until invited participants had taken their seats in the White House Situation Room.
In December 2016, the month before he left office, President Obama ordered the U.S. intelligence community to write an assessment evaluating the existing intelligence on Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 election. On January 6, 2017, in response to Obama’s request, the CIA (headed by John Brennan), the NSA (headed by Admiral Michael Rogers), and the FBI (directed by James Comey) produced a report in both classified and unclassified versions published under the auspices of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (James Clapper), titled “Background to ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections’: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution.” This pivotal document in the Russia-collusion drama became the Joint Intelligence Assessment or Joint Analysis Report [ICA].
The ICA placed the blame for the breach of the DNC computers, including the theft of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s and John Podesta’s email messages on Guccifer 2.0. The ICA contained two significant conclusions:
- Russia’s intelligence services conducted cyber operations against targets associated with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including targets associated with both major U.S. political parties.
- We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release U.S. victim data.
The ICA left no doubt that Guccifer 2.0 was the Russian intelligence agency hacker that stole the DNC emails. “We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks,” the ICA said.
Volume one, page forty-one of the Mueller report clearly states: “The GRU’s operations extended beyond stealing materials and included releasing documents stolen from the Clinton Campaign and its supporters. The GRU carried out the anonymous release through two fictitious online personas that it created—DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0—and later through the organization WikiLeaks.” In both of its volumes and all 448 pages, the Mueller report gives no forensic evidence to support this contention, making it clear that Mueller’s prosecutors and the FBI regurgitated the ICA as gospel without bothering to subject the conclusion “Russia stole the DNC emails” to a rigorous, independent investigation.
The truth is that ICA published on January 6, 2017, was a coordinated intelligence assessment that actually involved only three agencies—the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI—with the production of the report directed and managed by Clapper’s office as Director of National Intelligence (DNI). President Obama asked Clapper in early December 2016 to have the analysis completed and reported to him before he left office the following month. Yet the fact that the ICA was only supported by the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI, with the help of the DNI, did not stop Hillary Clinton from making the claim that the conclusion Russia stole the DNC emails was a conclusion to which all seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies agreed. After the ICA appeared, this bogus claim was widely parroted by the Clinton-supporting media, including CNN and MSNBC.
Yet James Clapper made in his sworn testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 8, 2017. Clapper acknowledged that the ICA report was the work product of no more than two dozen handpicked analysts. The claim was finally debunked when Clapper gave testimony to Congress on July 6, 2017, finally admitting that a New York Times report that seventeen intelligence agencies had confirmed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election was false. On June 29, 2017, the New York Times was forced to print a correction to its reporting that while “all seventeen organizations of the American intelligence community” had approved the ICA conclusions. The New York Times correction finally reported correctly that only four agencies were involved—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI.
Brennan was the lead cheerleader promoting the conclusions of the ICA in the intelligence community and Congress. In an influential article published in the Wall Street Journal on July 19, 2018, investigative reporter Kimberley Strassel characterized Brennan as an extremely political CIA director who served as a campaign and White House advisor to Obama. Strassel noted Brennan was allowed to continue his position at the CIA even after he aligned himself publicly with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Strassel stressed that Brennan “took the lead on shaping the narrative that Russia was interfering in the election specifically to help Mr. Trump—which quickly evolved into the Trump-collusion narrative.” In July 2016, Brennan faced a problem convincing Clapper and other intelligence agency heads, including Admiral Rogers at the NSA, that Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC computers and that Putin was responsible for giving this order to promote Trump and defeat Clinton. Strassel documented that Brennan faced a dilemma in that, as head of the CIA, “he had to be careful not to be seen interfering in U.S. politics,” nor could he investigate U.S. citizens.
Strassel wrote that Brennan’s solution was to recruit the assistance of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, another staunch Democrat supporter of Hillary Clinton. In a briefing in late August 2016, Brennan told Reid that Russia was trying to help Trump win the election and that Trump’s advisors might be colluding with Russia—two allegations that Strassel commented had yet to be proved. “But the truth was irrelevant,” Strassel wrote. Reid wrote a letter to FBI Director James Comey on cue, asking him to begin an FBI investigation. “The Reid letter marked the first official blast of the Brennan-Clinton collusion narrative into the open,” Strassel concluded.
The accumulating evidence suggests that the CIA created Guccifer 2.0 to blame the theft of the DNC emails on Russia. Again, there is no evidence Guccifer 2.0 ever hacked the DNC email server. Yet, by transferring Seth Rich’s laptops to CrowdStrike and not releasing the information publicly, the FBI colluded with the CIA to create the narrative demonizing anyone arguing Seth Rich was the culprit. As head of the CIA, Brennan institutionalized the U.S. intelligence agencies’ joint conclusion that Russia stole the DNC emails. The Mueller prosecutors willingly accepted the ICA report as established indisputable, as they set out to implement the CIA’s evident decision to remove Donald Trump from office.
In 2020, Jerome Corsi published Coup d’État: Exposing Deep State Treason, from which much of this article was drawn. In 2019, he published Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s “Witch Hunt,” explaining how the Mueller prosecutors confronted Dr. Corsi for over two months for hours at a time in a closed conference room with no windows. Dr. Corsi effectively ended the Mueller “Russian Collusion” investigation when he refused to take the Mueller prosecutors’ plea deal, alleging he had lied to the FBI. The FBI never indicted Dr. Corsi—further proof the Mueller prosecutors were the ones telling the lies.