New disclosures from the government’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the 2016 election, otherwise known as alleged “Trump-Russia collusion,” have revealed a stunning admission from top Obama-era officials.
A newly declassified memo, released Friday by Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, shows that U.S. intelligence officials concluded Russia did not play a significant role in Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. The document is the clearest proof yet that officials inside the Obama administration had serious doubts about Russian interference, even as they pressed forward with the investigation anyway.
The memo, dated 2016, told then-President Barack Obama directly that “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.”
While it acknowledges prior reporting about a possible breach of Illinois voter rolls and failed targeting attempts in other states, the memo clearly states that those efforts never touched voting systems—and didn’t come close to altering results.
“The targeting of infrastructure not used in casting ballots makes it highly unlikely it would have resulted in altering any state’s official vote,” the document reads. It goes further: “Criminal activity also failed to reach the scale and sophistication necessary to change election outcomes.”
The disclosure is a major vindication for Trump, who has long argued that the Russia collusion narrative was a hoax pushed by the Clinton campaign and Obama intelligence officials to sabotage his presidency before it began.
And now the pressure is turning on the people who pushed it.
FBI officials are preparing the groundwork for a possible criminal investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, and others involved in launching and running the Crossfire Hurricane probe.
According to a release from current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, career intelligence officials say Brennan deliberately kept parts of the investigation secret from other agencies and aggressively pushed to include the now-debunked Steele dossier—a document that falsely claimed connections between Trump and Russian agents.
A 200-page congressional audit has been compiled after a secret meeting last weekend between DOJ and intelligence officials. They’re now looking at whether to declassify even more documents, including Crossfire Hurricane notes and transcripts from special counsel John Durham’s investigation, which concluded in 2023 that the Trump–Russia connection was baseless.
Gabbard’s disclosure appears to be the first step in a broader transparency effort.
Officials are also looking at whether Brennan may have perjured himself in testimony to Congress, when he denied using the Steele dossier in the intelligence community’s final assessment. Though the statute of limitations on perjury may have run out, officials believe he could still face charges for conspiracy to commit perjury.
“Obama ordered the ICA to set Trump up and knock him off balance before he could even get started,” one senior official said. “This was an influence operation far more consequential than anything Putin cooked up. Obama and Hillary schemed the op, and the CIA and FBI ran it.”
Comey is also under renewed scrutiny. He recently stirred controversy after posting a cryptic message to social media that many saw as dangerously suggestive. According to sources, he was visited by the Secret Service earlier this year.