Trump vs. the Department of Democratic Party Justice

OPINION:

Outgoing President Donald Trump sorted through his White House records two years ago, knowing the FBI, Hillary Clinton enforcers and Democrats conspired to ruin his presidency from the start — based on a hoax.

His mindset: He wanted to collect the skullduggery’s official Russia inquiry documents, declassify them, and let the public read a fuller story.

Hundreds of pages of those Russia documents today sit at the Department of Justice after some were released under an open records request. A reporter sued DOJ in U.S. District Court earlier this year to acquire them.

Mr. Trump retained copies, so I assume they were all shipped to Mar-a-Lago and were inspected by FBI agents who searched his Florida home.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s June 8 indictment of Mr. Trump makes no mention of Justice Department/FBI records. Special counsel Jack Smith lists 31 classified military, foreign affairs and intelligence briefs as illegally retained by Mr. Trump.

Think back to 2017 to understand why the former president wanted to archive Russiagate.

Imagine you are the U.S. president in waiting, and into your New York office comes FBI Director James Comey. He tells you of an “intelligence” report that you, Donald Trump, romped with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

But he doesn’t tell you the information came via the Hillary Clinton campaign or that his FBI was going hog-wild using the same information — a Democratic-financed dossier — to destroy you.

“Honestly, I never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,” a nonchalant Mr. Comey said a year later to ABC News.

He also didn’t tell the incoming president that a month before, he had pressed the CIA to take the dossier in full and put it in the Obama administration’s assessment of Russian election interference.

I can only conclude that Mr. Comey wanted the world to know that Mr. Trump was accused of a massive conspiracy with the Kremlin. He wanted the intelligence people to embrace and love the dossier just as the FBI did. Yet at that time, the FBI had not confirmed a single substantive claim — and never would.

“On December 28 [2016], Director Comey was still insisting the document be in the body [of the Russia assessment],” a Senate Intelligence Committee report later stated.

The dossier’s claim of a “well-development conspiracy of cooperation” between Mr. Trump and the Kremlin — the nut sentence that drove the FBI’s get-Trump bias — was made up, the John Durham inquiry would later conclude.

But the FBI was a sinister place in 2016-17. The Hoover Building’s seventh floor would keep using the dossier to fraudulently obtain wiretap warrants from judges and cast a wide net to try to snare Mr. Trump and his aides.

Their passion came despite revelations from the dossier’s main source, Russian Igor Danchenko. He told the FBI’s lead intelligence analyst on Jan. 25, 2017, that the dossier’s author, British ex-spy Christopher Steele, “misstated or exaggerated” Mr. Danchenko’s reports to him, according to a Justice Department IG report.

The salacious tale that Mr. Comey personally took to then-President-elect Trump was “rumor and speculation,” Mr. Danchenko said.

When he bid the White House goodbye, Mr. Trump knew all this when he decided to safeguard Russia documents by ordering them declassified.

He realized the FBI went rogue and tried to destroy him. Senior Agent Peter Strzok said as much in a 2016 text to a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

“We’ll stop” him, he said.

Senate Republicans revealed U.S. intelligence reports that said the Kremlin had penetrated Mr. Steele’s collection operation and planted fake stuff. It told the FBI this devastating fact in early 2017.

Mr. Comey left Trump Tower that Jan. 6 day, perhaps feeling really good that he had rattled the president-elect. He went directly to the FBI’s New York field office to report to his top aides in Washington, including Mr. Strzok’s domain, Crossfire Hurricane, an inspector general report later disclosed. In other words, Mr. Comey’s trip to New York was not simply to brief Mr. Trump. It was part of Crossfire Hurricane.

Mr. Comey’s early public appearance regarding Russia came on March 20, 2017, before the House Intelligence Committee. He made the extraordinary announcement that the Trump campaign was under investigation for election interference. The statement meant months of constant turmoil for the new Trump White House.

Rep. Adam Schiff and other negligent committee Democrats served as a chorus to vouch for Mr. Steele and his 35 pages of hearsay.

Four days before the March 20 hearing, Mr. Danchenko, in a second interview, had told the FBI that his reports for the dossier were “word-of-mouth and hearsay” and “conversation that [he] had with friends over beers.”

In May 2017, Mr. Danchenko had a third session with the FBI and said the dossier confirmation was “zero.” Nonetheless, the FBI cited the dossier a month later to win a fourth 90-day wiretap on campaign volunteer Carter Page.

The strange FBI-Danchenko relationship got stranger. The FBI hired him as a confidential human source, paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mr. Danchenko, who was once suspected during the Obama years of being a Russian spy, never confirmed the dossier.

The FBI’s misdeeds eventually caught up with the bureau thanks to then-House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes and to a 2019 Justice Department inspector general’s report, which caught agents lying to judges.

I tell his 2016-17 narrative to put in context Mr. Trump’s mindset and how he felt justified in retaining documents to prove his Russia innocence. The FBI had never targeted a U.S. president the way it went after Mr. Trump.

It never dawned on agents that they themselves, along with Mrs. Clinton’s operatives, were using unverified Russian information and sources to interfere in the election.

John Solomon’s Just the News reported in March that Mr. Solomon is suing the Justice Department for refusing to release the Russia documents Mr. Trump ordered declassified.

Meanwhile, special counsel Robert Hur has yet to report on his investigation of President Biden’s mishandling of classified material. From his days as vice president, he had five batches of secret documents in three locations: his Chinese-funded think tank office, his home and his garage, next to his Corvette.

The FBI took and published photos of Mr. Trump’s boxes. We are waiting for the Biden montage.

I can already imagine the final Hur report conclusions from the Department of Democratic Party Justice: “unintentional; poor staff work; not aware; mix-up.”

• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.