The intelligence community’s dirty laundry will be aired this week by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag. The same crew exposed the public opinion influencing operation between Twitter and the FBI. Yesterday, they exposed how the CIA worked with the top intelligence agencies of our allies to spy on Trump associates long before the FBI signed off on their official counterintelligence probe in the summer of 2016. The CIA pegged 26 Trump associates to be surveilled illegally–all conducted to take down Trump. And now, there’s this binder cataloging these felonious intelligence operations that’s now in the open. It disappeared during the Trump presidency, but it’s also fitting that CNN left the first breadcrumb, written by the IC’s favorite scribe—Natasha Bertrand—who just got a promotion.  

The trio details Trump’s fight with the IC, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Department of Justice to declassify the Russigate documents. Trump’s CIA director, Gina Haspel, has been hell on wheels in blocking its disclosure, possibly because, as London bureau chief, she was one of the signatories that green-lit the Russian collusion investigation when the FBI asked her. The reasons for refusing to disclose these documents are the usual: people will die if declassified. No, it just exposed the IC’s rogue operations against the political rival of the then-sitting president. It went missing in 2021. The binder was compiled by House investigators under the watchful eye of the CIA in 2019-2020, though at some point—someone was able to get it out of Langley.