Ex-Director of National Intelligence says there’s ‘enough evidence to indict MULTIPLE people’ in Trump-Russia probe

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OPINION: This article contains commentary which may reflect the author’s opinion

John Ratcliffe, the former Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration, said there is ‘enough evidence’ to bring charges against ‘multiple people’ associated with the origin of the investigation into Russian interference with the ex-president’s campaign.

According to Fox News, Ratcliffe told Durham that Clinton’s lawyers may have hacked Trump’s server to fabricate ties with the campaign and Kremlin in order to distract from her own email scandal.

It is alleged that Hillary Clinton approved ‘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,’ revealed a heavily redacted CIA report that became accessible to the public in October 2020.

In September 2016, the CIA forwarded a memo to FBI Director James Comey and FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok at the FBI.

Ratcliffe has privately expressed concerns about the CIOL’s direction to Comey and Strzok, according to a Fox source familiar with the situation.

According to Ratcliffe, John Brennan, the CIA Director under President Obama, disclosed to the then-president in 2016 that Clinton was linking Trump to Russia based on the allegations Durham revealed recently.

‘What did John Brennan tell President Obama in the Oval Office in 2016?’ Bill Hemmer asked Ratcliffe during a Fox News interview on Monday.

‘Well, I can talk about this because this part has been declassified,’ he 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.’

‘And so everything that happened after that is one of the reasons that John Durham is investigating,’ Ratcliffe continued.

‘Those are the issues that John Durham is looking at and I think there will be many more,’ he predicted. ‘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.’

Durham and Ratcliffe met more than once, and Ratcliffe discussed his assessment that multiple people could have been charged with a crime in the events that led to Trump being impeached for the first time. He was acquitted by the Senate.

Ratcliffe was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas before becoming Trump’s director of national intelligence. He was previously representative for Texas’s 4th congressional district.

According to a poll conducted before the recent bombshell revelations that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had been spying on Donald Trump, a growing chorus of Democrats believe Hillary Clinton should be interviewed by special advisor John Durham about her alleged role in the Russian secret server scandal.

According to the TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP), 66 percent of Democrats want Clinton questioned, a 22 percentage point increase from October last year.

GOP demand for answers is also growing, reaching 91 percent in January from 80 percent last October. Among independents, 74 percent now want the former secretary of state investigated, up from 65 percent before.

The two polls were taken before last week’s bombshell report by Special Counsel John Durham that alleged Clinton’s campaign team tried to spy on President Trump’s computer servers in an attempt to tie him to Russia.

During the 2016 campaign, Clinton, 74, hired an investigator to ‘infiltrate’ servers at Trump Tower and the White House.

1,308 Americans participated in the survey conducted by the New Jersey-based company.

As Durham has revealed in a recent filing, the intent was to smear Trump by tying him to Russia. Clinton’s campaign consistently claimed that Trump used a secret server to communicate with the Russians, but there has been no proof of this claim.

In October 2020, while Trump was president, Durham was named Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice by then-Attorney General William Barr.

He is carrying out an investigation into a case that is sure to anger supporters of the 45th president.

In the motion that Durham filed on Friday, he assessed a potential conflict of interest in the case of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, who was charged with making a false statement to a federal agent. A not guilty plea has been entered by Sussman.

The indictment against Sussman details how two months prior to the presidential election, in September 2016, he explained to FBI General Counsel James Baker he was not working ‘for any client’ when presented papers allegedly outlining a ‘covert communications channel’ between Trump’s Organization and Alfa Bank, the largest of the private banks in Russia which has ties to the Kremlin.

In Durham’s filing on Friday, he revealed how 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), named as Rodney Joffe, at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign.’

Sussman’s own ‘billing records’ show he ‘repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations.’

It also states how Sussman and the Tech Executive (Joffe) met to speak with another lawyer working as General Counsel to the Clinton campaign, who Fox identify as Marc Elias from Perkins Coie law firm.

The filing also reveals how Josse worked with Sussman at the instruction of the Clinton campaign to ‘assemble the purported data and white papers’ – essentially to gather the information that would tie Trump to Russia.

Durham tells how Tech Executive-1 said he was trying to please certain ‘VIPs,’ which is said to have been a reference to the Clinton campaign.

Kash Patel, the former chief investigator of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Trump-Russia, said Friday’s filing ‘definitively showed the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia,’ Fox News reports.

‘Per Durham, this arrangement was put in motion in July of 2016, meaning the Hillary Clinton campaign and her lawyers masterminded the most intricate and coordinated conspiracy against Trump when he was both a candidate and later president of the United States while simultaneously perpetuating the bogus Steele Dossier hoax,’ Patel explained to Fox.

In a statement Sunday, Trump compared the alleged spying to the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s fall.

‘What Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left Democrats did with respect to spying on a President of the United States, even while in office, is a far bigger crime than Watergate,’ Trump declared.

‘It will be interesting to see how it was covered by the media and what Mitch McConnell and the RINOs will be doing about it. This is an insult to the Republican Party, but a far greater insult to our Nation.’

Following Durham’s court filing explaining the alleged hack, Trump unleashed a scathing response on Sunday, saying that Team Clinton’s behavior once would have merited execution.

‘In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death. In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.’

Source: The Republic Brief