Trump thought his appointees would expose the truth about the Russian collusion hoax.
He was dead wrong.
And Trump's own cabinet just got caught hiding the biggest secret about the Russian collusion hoax.
Trump's Appointees Buried Evidence That Would Have Changed 2020
The Russian collusion hoax nearly destroyed Trump's first term.
Obama officials manufactured intelligence tying Trump to Moscow and launched investigations that crippled his presidency.
Trump's own appointees helped keep that fraud alive.
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 exposed the Obama administration's machinations.¹
Durham stopped the declassification and release of key evidence debunking the foundational document of the hoax – the Intelligence Community Assessment – right before the 2020 election.²
That's evidence voters deserved to see before they cast their ballots.
The ICA Was Built On Lies And Everyone Knew It
The Intelligence Community Assessment prepared in Obama's final days claimed Russia tried to help Trump win in 2016.
That document became the pretext for years of espionage investigations targeting Trump and his advisers.
A 2018 government review found the ICA's most explosive claims were based on "one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports."³
It also cited Clinton-funded political dirt from the Steele dossier as supporting intelligence.⁴
"The ICA misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports," which were "either proven false or unsubstantiated," according to the top-secret congressional analysis.⁵
House Intelligence Committee investigators discovered all of this in 2017 and 2018 while examining the classified intelligence at CIA headquarters.
But Trump never found out.
Bolton Knew And Never Told Trump
Fred Fleitz, who was Bolton's chief of staff, read a draft of the House Intelligence Committee report in 2018.
He was shocked at what investigators had uncovered about the shoddy and fabricated intelligence behind the ICA.
Fleitz sat down at his classified computer and wrote a synopsis for Bolton, thinking the National Security Adviser would brief the president immediately.⁶
"He didn't do anything with it. He never told Trump, and I never heard anything about it again," Fleitz said.⁷
If Trump had known about these revelations, he could have used them to remove the cloud of suspicion hanging over his presidency.
Bolton kept Trump in the dark and let him twist in the wind.
Haspel Made Sure Congress Couldn't Investigate
CIA Director Gina Haspel did everything possible to obstruct the House Intelligence Committee's investigation.
She made investigators lock up their laptops and materials at CIA headquarters every night.⁸
The agency forced investigators to use specially modified computers that had "peculiar machine glitches" causing "lines of text to appear fuzzy, forcing restarts to correct and sometimes resulting in lost text or footnotes."⁹
Investigators suspected the CIA was tampering with their computers and spying on them.¹⁰
"Deliberate technical modifications to the computers made the machines unstable and unreliable," which slowed the investigation.¹¹
Haspel also took nearly five months before allowing investigators to interview the five authors who wrote the ICA for Obama's CIA Director John Brennan.¹²
When she left office in January 2021, Haspel locked all drafts of the report in a gun safe inside a CIA vault.¹³
"Gina Haspel buried the report," said Derek Harvey, who worked as a senior analysis adviser with the House Intelligence Committee from 2017 to 2022.¹⁴
Durham Stopped Trump From Exposing The Plot Before 2020
In October 2020, National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe sought to declassify the devastating 44-page report that refuted the ICA's claim Moscow tried to swing the election to Trump.
But Durham insisted the report be kept under wraps, arguing he needed it for his own investigation.¹⁵
"Durham specifically asked for that report to not be declassified and released," a former senior intelligence official said.¹⁶
Ratcliffe agreed to withhold it.
The report remained buried for five years until Trump's new National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard declassified it in July 2025.
"After we gave Durham the report, along with over a thousand pages of other classified documents, he went ghost," the former official said. "We didn't hear from him, and he didn't appear to do anything with the report."¹⁷
Durham's final report on the scandal all but ignored the ICA despite having interviewed Brennan and Clapper.
Outside of one footnote, there is no mention of the ICA in his 316-page report.¹⁸
Washington media now use Durham's limited investigation to claim prosecutors won't find anything incriminating against Obama-era officials currently under investigation.
"John Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration, looked exhaustively at the Russian interference assessment and found no criminal wrongdoing," MSNBC's Ken Dilanian recently claimed.¹⁹
But Durham never examined the criminal conspiracy behind the ICA.
Obama's Team Rigged Intelligence Against Trump
The declassified documents released this summer proved Obama's CIA Director John Brennan manufactured the intelligence used to justify investigations of Trump.
"The CIA engaged in a conspiracy to fabricate intelligence against Trump," Harvey said. "They were effectively running an intelligence op targeting his campaign and presidency."²⁰
Within three weeks of Trump's 2016 victory, the CIA came up with new evidence claiming Putin personally launched an influence operation to help Trump – contradicting all prior assessments.²¹
Career intelligence analysts objected to using the Clinton-funded Steele dossier in the ICA, but Brennan overruled them.²²
At least one senior intelligence analyst said he was "threatened" by superiors to change his pre-election assessment to conform with the new ICA.²³
The whistleblower reached out to Durham's investigators to report suspicions of "manipulation" of raw intelligence, but they never interviewed him.²⁴
"They rigged and politicized the intelligence," Fleitz said. "And that was obvious to anyone who read that dynamite report."²⁵
That included Barr, Durham, Bolton, Pompeo, Haspel, and other Trump appointees who suppressed it instead of exposing the scandal before the 2020 election.
Trump trusted these people to have his back.
They stabbed him in it instead.
¹ Paul Sperry, "How Trump's Own Appointees Aided Russiagate Plot Against Him," RealClearInvestigations, November 20, 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ Ibid.
¹⁴ Ibid.
¹⁵ Ibid.
¹⁶ Ibid.
¹⁷ Ibid.
¹⁸ Ibid.
¹⁹ Ibid.
²⁰ Ibid.
²¹ Ibid.
²² Ibid.
²³ Ibid.
²⁴ Ibid.
²⁵ Ibid.
