Former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell said the FBI absolutely broke the law with its surveillance of Donald Trum...
Former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell said the FBI absolutely broke the law with its surveillance of Donald Trump both when he was a candidate and after he became president.
In an interview with Just the News’ John Solomon published on Wednesday, Grenell agreed that leadership at the bureau and the Department of Justice must have known ahead of time that evidence that Trump somehow “colluded” with Russia to affect the outcome of the 2016 election was false.
“Political appointees and the leaders of the FBI and DOJ purposefully manipulated the truth,” he told Solomon.
Grenell also said he has spoken with FBI operatives who knew the investigation into Trump was faulty.
“The people in the middle management, I’ve talked to them. I’ve talked to FBI agents. They knew that this was a phony exercise,” he said.
“But they were caught by their bosses, who knew that this was a phony Russian collusion hoax but allowed this information to go to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] courts and to the media and to everywhere else, and they saw people manipulating it,” Grenell said.
He added that he believes special prosecutor John Durham will soon bring more charges.
Even though Durham has been investigating the Russia hoax for three years, the special prosecutor has secured only one conviction.
In January, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was convicted of altering an email from the CIA regarding former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The openly anti-Trump Clinesmith pleaded guilty to adding a phrase to a June 2017 email that had provided information about Page’s relationship with the agency.
Clinesmith deliberately added a line saying Page was “not a source” of intel for the CIA even though he was an occasional source for the agency, and that fact was obscured from the FISA court. If the court understood that Page was a CIA asset, it likely wouldn’t have approved of the FBI’s surveillance of Page.
Despite the conviction, Clinesmith was sentenced to just one year of probation, USA Today reported.
“Do you have any doubt there are more crimes to be prosecuted by Durham?” Solomon asked Grenell.
He said he is sure more is coming.
“Yeah, I have no doubt,” Grenell said, adding that it was “for sure” that the FBI broke the law.
Durham has indicted two others, and those cases are ongoing.
Former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was indicted in February. Clinton’s law team attempted to have the indictment thrown out, but to no avail. Its next tactic was to have parts of the indictment struck, but that also failed, Fox News reported.
Durham also has indicted former Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko on charges of lying to the FBI during the probe.
But Grenell said these lone actors are only the tip of the iceberg and the whole incident shows an out-of-control government betraying America.
“For the political people at DOJ and FBI, that’s where they need to be held to account,” he told Solomon.
“We hear a lot about, you know, manipulative politicians and political appointees manipulating the powers of government,” Grenell said. “But I’ve never seen it more rampant than in Democratic administrations because the media allows them to get away with it.”
Still, many are frustrated that Durham has not yet done more. Trump himself has wondered aloud what the special prosecutor is doing.
“Where’s Durham? Is he a living, breathing human being? Will there ever be a Durham report?” he said in a statement on March 26, 2021.
In another statement on Aug. 9, 2021, the former president said, “Does everybody remember when we caught the Democrats, red-handed, SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN? Where’s Durham?”
Trump has called the FBI’s illicit surveillance of his campaign and presidency the “biggest political crime in American history, by far!”
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