Susan Ferrechio | April 15, 2025
(The Washington Times) — The top brass in the FBI and intelligence community were determined to stop President Trump from winning the White House in 2016, and they talked about removing him from office months after he was sworn in, according to newly released documents.
The zeal to pin Russian collusion allegations on Mr. Trump spilled out of the 700 pages of emails, memos, interviews and other material connected to the 2016 “Crossfire Hurricane” probe that were newly made public by the Trump administration.
Some of the material is familiar, released in 2021 by Mr. Trump on the final day of his first term. Other pages provide greater detail about the unprecedented secret probe and spy operation on Mr. Trump’s campaign that followed him into the White House.
In one newly released memo, dated May 2017, four months into Mr. Trump’s first term, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe discussed “the President’s capacity and the possibility that he could be removed from office under the 25th Amendment.”
At the time, the Justice Department was reeling over Mr. Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey on May 9, 2017, and was weighing the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the FBI’s probe into allegations, later proven phony, that Mr. Trump colluded with Russia to win the election.
Mr. Rosenstein said he believed he “might already have two supporters” among the eight cabinet members he would need to remove Mr. Trump under the 25th Amendment: Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.
The plan never moved forward and Mr. Kelly was elevated to serve as Mr. Trump’s White House Chief of Staff a mere two months later, in July of 2017. He left the White House in January 2019.
Mr. Trump fired Mr. Sessions in November 2018.
The new documents provide additional details about the motive behind the phony “Steele Dossier,” paid for and created on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that alleges Russia had damaging information about President Trump.
The dossier, never verified or fully trusted by anyone in the federal government, nonetheless became the centerpiece of the FBI’s evidence against Mr. Trump and was used to obtain a secret warrant to spy on his 2016 campaign.
On Aug. 3, 2016, during the final stretch of the presidential campaign, CIA Director John O. Brennan met with President Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden and other senior administration officials, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch, to discuss “Russian interference efforts,” according to a memo declassified in 2020 and written by John Ratcliffe, who was the Director of National Intelligence.
Mr. Brennan briefed the group on the “intelligence” gathered on Mr. Trump by the Clinton campaign. He told the group of the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
Newly released Crossfire Hurricane documents show that the dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, a former British spy, was desperate to ensure Mrs. Clinton won the 2016 election. Mr. Steele told the FBI, according to a 2017 memo, that Mr. Trump was his “main opponent” and that he feared “how Trump’s presidency negatively impacted the historical U.K.-U.S. alliance and the U.S.-U.K. special relationship.”
Days after the 2016 election, the FBI interviewed Bruce Ohr, then an associate deputy attorney general who was urged by Mr. Steele to open an investigation into Mr. Trump’s Russia connections.
Mr. Ohr described Mr. Steele as “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. president.” He said he believed Mr. Steele “wanted to blunt or foil the Kremlin’s plans.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 18-month investigation found no evidence Mr. Trump colluded with Russia to win the presidency but concluded Russia had acted to interfere in the election to benefit Mr. Trump.
The newly released documents show desperation to stop Mr. Trump among top brass from the FBI. The deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, Peter Strzok, an avowed Trump hater, discussed in inter-bureau electronic messages the FBI’s proposal to form a “Trump unit” to investigate the new president days before he was sworn into office in 2017.
Mr. Strzok, electronic messages showed, also delved into “sourcing” rumors about Mr. Trump’s connections with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including a claim about Mr. Putin “using the roof of Trump tower.”
Like Mr. Steele, Mr Strzok was eager to prevent Mr. Trump from winning in 2016 and shifted his focus to investigating the president after he prevailed in the election.
Mr. Strzok, at the time, was having an affair with an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page, and the texts exposed years ago show the two conspiring to block Mr. Trump from winning.
The FBI never vetted the Steele dossier, but documents show that Igor Danchenko, who was Mr. Steele’s primary source for the unproven allegations about Mr. Trump and Russia, was introduced to him by Trump foe Fiona Hill.
Ms. Hill was on the first Trump administration’s National Security Council and later served as a prime witness against Mr. Trump in his first impeachment trial.
She claimed to have never seen the dossier until a day before it was published on the now-defunct news site Buzzfeed on Jan. 10, 2020.
The dossier made wild claims about Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Russians. Russia was cultivating Mr. Trump and supporting him for five years and accepted “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin,” the dossier asserted.
It also claimed Russia was in a position to blackmail Mr. Trump with “kompromat” involving a videotape of Mr. Trump in Moscow partying with prostitutes at the Ritz-Carlton and ordering them to urinate on a bed in the presidential suite, where the Obamas once slept.
Mr. Trump called the entire investigation a “witch hunt” and a “hoax” that hobbled his first term in office.
He signed an executive order on March 25 declassifying the remaining Crossfire Hurricane documents that were not released in 2021, but the latest batch contained many redactions.
Mr. Trump called the investigation into his campaign “total weaponization” and “a disgrace” without precedent.
“Frankly, the FBI should be ashamed of themselves, and so should the Department of Justice and so should Biden,” he said.
