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Former U.S. Ambassador to Germany and interim director of national intelligence Ric Grenell expressed confidence that some FBI agents and officials violated U.S. laws during the bureau’s investigation of alleged ‘collusion’ between his former boss, then-President Donald Trump, and Russia in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
In an interview with the “John Solomon Reports” podcast on Wednesday, Grenell said he was “for sure” crimes were committed because he says he’s seen the evidence.
He also said there was every reason for FBI officials to know that the so-called evidence of collusion was faulty or false but they proceeded anyway, including misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Congress with lies and omissions.
“Political appointees and the leaders of the FBI and DOJ purposefully manipulated the truth,” he told Solomon. “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.
“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 FISA courts and to the media and to everywhere else, and they saw people manipulating it,” he added.
Just The News adds:
After three years of investigation, Special Prosecutor John Durham has secured a single conviction, against Kevin Clinesmith on a charge the former FBI lawyer doctored evidence to submit to the courts.
Durham has also indicted former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann and former Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko on charges of lying to the FBI probe. Both have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.
“Do you have any doubt there are more crimes to be prosecuted by Durham?” Grenell was asked during the interview.
“Yeah, I have no doubt,” he responded.
Pressed as to whether he saw actually saw any evidence that the FBI violated laws during the probe, he added: “For sure.”
The former diplomat and DNI also said that misconduct on the part of the FBI, which was first revealed in a Justice Department inspector general report in 2019, should be looked at in the context of a much larger, and growing, trend among government agencies and the media betraying the trust of Americans.
“For the political people at DOJ and FBI, that’s where they need to be held to account,” he said. “We hear a lot about, you know, manipulative politicians and political appointees manipulating the powers of government. But I’ve never seen it more rampant than in Democratic administrations because the media allows them to get away with it.”
Grenell’s remarks are very similar to those made by his DNI successor, John Ratcliffe, who told Fox News that he turned over more than 1,000 documents to Durham and is confident more prosecutions are forthcoming.
“I would expect there to be quite a few more indictments because of that,” Ratcliffe said last month. “There was not a proper predicate to begin that investigation. John Durham has said that publicly already.”
He also said then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden knew about the 2016 Clinton campaign’s efforts to “infiltrate” internet servers first at Trump Tower and then in the Trump White House in a plot to try and find nefarious connections between the then-president and the Kremlin.
“What did John Brennan tell President Obama in the Oval Office in 2016?” Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer asked Ratcliffe during Monday’s interview.
“Well, I can talk about this because this part has been declassified,” he said.
“He briefed President Obama and Vice President Biden and other members of the national security team about this specific intelligence that John Durham now has about a Hillary Clinton plan to falsely accuse and vilify Donald Trump with a scandal, and the discussion around that and whether or not it was good intelligence,” Ratcliffe added.
“Those are the issues that John Durham is looking at and I think there will be many more,” he predicted, adding: “I would expect there to be quite a few more indictments because of that. There wasn’t a proper predicate to begin that investigation and John Durham has said that publicly already.”
