Amid last week’s whirlwind news cycle — which featured a major summit with Russia and the Trump administration’s takeover of the Washington, D.C., police force — an important Russiagate revelation slipped under the radar.
In December 2016, just weeks before Donald Trump would take office, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers raised concerns in an email to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about a report tying Trump to Russia.
Rogers cautioned that his analysts had not been given enough time to fully review the intelligence and could not yet be completely confident in their conclusions. But time was short. Clapper, determined to move forward before Trump assumed office, made clear delays would not be tolerated.
According to newly released documents, Clapper replied: “It is essential that we (CIA/NSA/FBI/ODNI) be on the same page, and are all supportive of the report – in the highest tradition of ‘that’s OUR story, and we’re sticking to it.’”
If this email is authentic — and it has not been denied — it is not just a smoking gun; it is essentially an admission. Clapper added that the intelligence community might have to “compromise on our ‘normal’ modalities” to meet the rushed deadline. The language reads less like routine procedure and more like an effort to undermine a president-elect.
This was not the first evidence of coordination among Obama-era officials. Around the time of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, an email allegedly from a vice president at the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundation stated: “HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level.”
By the time Hillary Clinton lost the election, the urgency had only grown. Smearing Trump as a Russian asset became the strategy to weaken his presidency. And to a large degree, it worked.
Today it is clear: Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and other officials did not stumble into mistakes. They saw the red flags — and plowed ahead anyway.
Some Trump supporters want immediate arrests, and there is growing evidence laws may have been broken. The justice system, however, moves slowly. What should not be delayed any longer is the acknowledgment that the effort to paint Trump as a Russian puppet was deliberate and destructive.
Were Pulitzer Prizes won during this saga worth the cost? As they gather dust, they serve less as badges of honor than as reminders of a media that too often carried water for a false narrative.
There are no longer any innocent explanations. Obama officials did not simply misjudge the facts. They lied. The press did not relentlessly demand answers. They misled the public.
The scope of this deception — a calculated attempt to undermine the will of American voters — remains staggering. And yet, many outlets that fueled it will never admit their role.
For now, the responsibility falls to the current DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, to continue exposing what increasingly looks like an organized attempt to sabotage a duly elected president.
It is not enough that the conspiracy against President Trump failed. The nation must ensure that nothing like it is ever allowed to happen again.
