FBI knew of Hillary Clinton-George Soros plan to spread Trump-Russia hoax, new docs reveal

Newly declassified Justice Department documents implicate left-wing donor George Soros in the FBI plot to spread Trump-Russia collusion allegations before the 2016 presidential election.

The once-secret material also exposes bombshell evidence of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s plot to “demonize Putin and Trump.”

The documents show that emails Russians hacked from Mr. Soros’ left-wing Open Society Foundations, authored by an employee named Leonard Benardo, laid out plans to spread the Russia collusion hoax to “leading U.S. publications” via entities connected to the FBI.

They also show that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was enthusiastically involved in the plot and saw it as a way to draw attention away from her illegal email server and the thousands of government emails she secretly deleted while serving as secretary of state.

A Benardo email relayed that Mrs. Clinton “approved” of her campaign adviser’s “idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections.”

He explained, “That should distract people from her own missing emails.”

An Open Society Foundations spokesperson rejected the accusations in the report, saying in a statement to The Washington Times that “the claim that the Open Society Foundations helped orchestrate an FBI investigation is an outrageous falsehood.”

“It is grounded in malicious disinformation traced to Russian intelligence and now weaponized as part of a politically motivated campaign to attack our leadership and our work to promote human rights,” the spokesperson said.

“The Durham report found no wrongdoing by our staff. We are a nonpartisan organization and do not engage in political campaign activity,” the statement said. “These accusations are not just reckless, they are dangerous. They reflect a broader effort to foment hostility and undermine civil society — and they are calculated to distract from real scandals.”

The bombshell revelations were annexed to a 2023 report by Justice Department special counsel John Durham on the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the conspiracy theory that President Trump schemed with Moscow to rig the 2016 election.

The annex was declassified by top intelligence officials and made public Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican.

The report details false FBI statements to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to win approval to spy on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign.

It also outlines the FBI’s failure under Director James B. Comey to investigate intelligence that the Clinton campaign may have fabricated the Russia collusion hoax.

At the same time, the report notes, the FBI used the bogus dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by the Clinton campaign to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Mr. Page.

In requesting its declassification, which included information collected by the CIA and National Security Agency, Mr. Grassley said that “the overriding public interest demands the release of this information, and doing so would benefit public transparency and accountability.”

“Based on the Durham annex,” he said, “the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means.”

The appendix describes memos labeled “confidential conversations” between Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and two people at the Open Society Foundations: Mr. Benardo and Jeffrey Goldstein.

One memo said President Obama aimed to shut down the FBI’s politically damaging investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server and her mishandling of highly classified information during her time as secretary of state.

A second memo referenced the same Obama effort to scuttle the Clinton email investigation and outlined a plan to link Mr. Trump to Russia.

The Democratic Party’s “opposition is focused on discrediting Trump,” the memo said. “Among other things, the Clinton staff, with support from special services, is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and the ‘Russian Mafia.’”

FBI analysts speculated that the “special services” mentioned in the memo may have been code names for the FBI and the CIA or, more broadly, the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities.

Analysts also thought it could refer to Mr. Steele. His discredited dossier alleged sordid and unproven claims about Mr. Trump.

The declassified annex documents show the FBI was aware of the Clinton plot to tie Mr. Trump to Russia months before the bureau launched its now-discredited investigation of the Trump-Russia link.

On March 31, 2016, FBI officials, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, shared the intelligence about the alleged Clinton campaign plan with high-ranking career officials at the Justice Department.

In July 2016, the FBI received more intelligence about the Clinton campaign plan, including emails allegedly sent by Mr. Benardo, who was the senior vice president of the Open Society Foundations.

One of Mr. Bernardo’s emails said:

“During the first stage of the campaign, due to lack of direct evidence, it was decided to disseminate the necessary information through the FBI-affiliated … technical structures … in particular, the Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect companies, from where the information would then be disseminated through leading U.S. publications.”

Another email said: “The media analysis on the DNC hacking appears solid. … Julianne Smith [a Clinton campaign foreign policy adviser] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”

In another email, Mr. Bernardo said that the “point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue. … In absence of direct evidence, Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect will supply the media, and GRU [Russia’s main intelligence directorate] will hopefully carry on to give more facts.”

When the Obama administration received this intelligence in March 2016, Fusion GPS, a Washington-based opposition research firm, was preparing the dossier about purported ties between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.

This research ultimately became known as the “Steele dossier.”

As early as July 2016, Russian intelligence was aware of Mr. Steele’s anti-Trump research, according to a 2020 review by the Justice Department’s inspector general office.

What’s more, the FBI had possession of reports in 2017 that the dossier may have had Russian sources and was potentially Russian disinformation.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that the newly released documents are further proof “that Hillary Clinton approved the Russia hoax against President Trump, her campaign financed it. She approved it, and the FBI and the CIA were both weaponized to accelerate this hoax.”

Earlier this month, the matter was referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. Democrats denounced the move and said there is plenty of evidence that Russia tried to meddle in the 2016 election.