OPINION:
After a four-year wait, the administration has produced the Russiagate binder that President Trump declassified at the end of his first term. Like the recently uncovered John F. Kennedy assassination files and the documents detailing Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, the Russiagate release last week was a bit of a letdown.
The stack of papers delivered to congressional committees was supposed to provide insight into the operation that Hillary Clinton and her allies in the media and government executed to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The goal of the plot was to smear Mr. Trump as if he were a double agent working on Moscow’s behalf.
Most of the records had already been made public. Worse, unnecessary redactions remain, especially those covering the names of lower-level scheme participants. The practice of hiding the names of government officials needs to end.
When Mr. Trump signed the executive order authorizing disclosure of the Russiagate material, he asked, “[It’s] all declassified? Everything?” He was told it was, but it wasn’t. There should be additional memos explaining the involvement of CIA Director John O. Brennan and President Obama.
Fortunately, the administration is still digging. At last week’s Cabinet meeting, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard described the scale of the ongoing effort to seek intentionally mislaid documentation.
“Declassification and rooting out weaponization, politicization of the intelligence community is a huge priority. You know more than anyone else the very dangerous and negative consequences of that. I’ve got a long list of things that we’re investigating,” Ms. Gabbard told the president.
She explained that 100 people are busy locating and scanning files related to the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations.
“We also have hunters going out, Mr. President, and looking in the storage lockers at FBI and CIA and other agencies specifically to find if there is anything else that has not been reported. We’re actively going out and trying to search out the truth,” Ms. Gabbard said.
Hopefully, Ms. Gabbard’s team will find the missing pieces that complete the story of the intelligence community’s role in interfering in the 2016 election. Until then, a careful look at the new release does yield small but revealing details.
FBI papers indicate that the bureau paid Stefan Halper $1.2 million over his long career as a snitch. During Russiagate, he informed on Mr. Trump’s campaign aides, including Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Peter Navarro, Jeff Sessions and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Not everything he did was on the up and up. For instance, the files outline the aspersions he cast on a British graduate student, Svetlana Lokhova. Mr. Halper told the FBI a lurid tale of her seducing Gen. Flynn at a 2014 dinner at Cambridge University.
The assertion was easily disproved, and FBI memos deemed the story “not plausible.” An FBI report on Mr. Halper’s value as a source noted that the bureau believed he was “motivated by monetary compensation.”
Nonetheless, FBI leadership ran with the calumny because it fit Mrs. Clinton’s narrative perfectly: a Russian-born academic who was secretly a spy had turned the Defense Intelligence Agency chief. Despite the holes in the narrative, it was leaked to the British press to tarnish the campaign.
Incidents such as these confirm that the Russian collusion investigation was never a search for the truth. The public deserves a complete account of the methods used in this political operation to ensure it never happens again.
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