How Trump’s Own First-Term Appointees Aided the Russiagate Plot Against Him
Insubordination at best, active Deep State collusion at worst, many of Trump's key appointees participated in the Democrats' attempted Russiagate color revolution, just as they did in late 2020.
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by Paul Sperry
December 1, 2025
When Obama administration officials manufactured U.S. intelligence tying Donald Trump to Moscow following his stunning 2016 victory, they had no idea Trump’s own political appointees would help them undermine Trump’s presidency — and his chances of reelection in 2020.
Recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews with former Trump officials reveal for the first time how key members of Trump’s cabinet and other appointees during his first term shrouded the previous administration’s machinations and either deliberately or inadvertently misled the public into thinking the fake Russiagate intelligence was real.
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Former Special Counsel John Durham, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former CIA Director Gina Haspel dismissed or buried evidence that cast doubt on a foundational document of the Russigate hoax — the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) prepared in the waning days of the Obama administration.
Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General William Barr, stopped the declassification and release of key exculpatory evidence debunking the ICA on the eve of the 2020 election, which has not been reported previously.
The ICA helped frame the false narrative, which led to multiple espionage investigations that dogged Trump throughout his first term, that Russian President Vladimir Putin had authorized dirty tricks to help Trump win the 2016 election. A 2018 government review of that document, which was chiefly prepared by Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and his National Intelligence Director James Clapper, found that its most explosive claims were based on “one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard [intelligence] reports,” according to a recently declassified report that Trump administration and, later, Biden administration officials had helped keep locked away in a CIA vault.
It also cited as supporting intelligence debunked political dirt paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
While these Trump-appointed officials may not have initiated the weaponization of the CIA against Trump, they facilitated it by hiding evidence that exposed the claims that Russia tried to help Trump as a fraud. By obscuring Joe Biden’s own role in perpetrating the hoax, they helped Obama’s vice president win the close race for the presidency in 2020.
“The Russiagate betrayal continued in plain sight,” said former Trump national security adviser J.D. Gordon, with some in Trump’s own cabinet letting him twist in the wind instead of daylighting secreted material that would have cleared the clouds of suspicion hanging over his head before the 2020 election.
John Bolton
The suppression can be traced back at least until mid-2018.