by Matt Taibbi at Racket News
“The beginning of the end” just took on new meaning
What a roller-coaster the last week has been.
On the heels of the devastating, embarrassing announcement by Donald Trump’s Justice Department that there would be no new document releases in the Jeffrey Epstein case, there is real — if confusing — progress in an equally explosive investigation. In a story first broken by Fox News, reported further by Margot Cleveland at The Federalist, Miranda Devine at the New York Post, and Paul Sperry at RealClear Investigations, and bolstered now by our own sources at Racket, it’s confirmed: FBI Director Kash Patel has opened criminal investigations into former CIA chief John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, for offenses related to the Trump-Russia scandal colloquially known as “Russiagate.”
The opening of criminal probes into two of the most powerful enforcement chiefs of the Trump era marks the first steps toward consequences for the elaborate and historically unprecedented intelligence fraud that for years consumed American politics. The Bureau will look at possible perjury and conspiracy offenses for both, focusing initially on how Brennan’s CIA and Comey’s FBI worked to produce the infamous “Intelligence Community Assessment” of January 6th, 2017.
The public portion of that report included a summary that said that the agencies assessed that “[Vladimir] Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.” This narrative — that Russia not only “influenced” the 2016 election but “aspired” to help Donald Trump at Hillary Clinton’s expense — quickly became conventional wisdom in media, then snowballed into a political scandal and a Special Counsel investigation that for some time seemed destined to topple the first Trump presidency:…
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