Nearly four years ago, President Barack Obama’s FBI and the Department of Justice sought to use secret counterintelligence tools in an unprecedented way to surveil an American citizen involved with an opposing party’s presidential campaign. It is now clear that the effort’s pivot point was an interview that remained classified for more than three years, and which should have brought an immediate end to both the court-authorized surveillance and the media narrative that President Trump was compromised by the Russian government.
There is simply no good faith argument to be made that the FBI reasonably believed its investigation into an alleged criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia should have continued after January 2017, when FBI agents interviewed Christopher Steele’s recently identified source, Igor Danchenko. After that interview, high-level FBI agents, as well as FBI and DOJ leadership, knew beyond all doubt that there was no “well-developed” conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. All investigations afterward, including the Mueller investigation, were political, had no criminal basis, and caused years of fear and loathing of Trump.
