Hillary Clinton Greenlit Russia Hoax To Hide Email Scandal, Declassified Docs Reveal

Newly declassified documents have confirmed what many Americans long suspected: Hillary Clinton personally authorized a plan to smear Donald Trump with a false Russia collusion narrative in order to deflect attention from her own spiraling email scandal during the 2016 presidential race.

The revelations come from a cache of intelligence documents released by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), based on findings from Special Counsel John Durham’s years-long investigation into the origins of the Trump–Russia probe. According to the files, the scheme to fabricate links between Trump and the Kremlin wasn’t merely a partisan whisper campaign—it was an orchestrated political operation approved at the highest level of Clinton’s campaign.

One memo—dated July 27, 2016—describes Clinton’s approval of a plan pushed by her foreign policy advisor, Julianne Smith, to “magnify the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican candidate.” The email from Clinton’s camp adds chilling clarity: “That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level.”

The documents expose a deliberate strategy to make the Russian angle a domestic political issue and sow doubt in the legitimacy of Trump’s campaign. Even more damning, the plan included the Clinton camp working through companies linked to the FBI—namely Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect—to funnel disinformation to the press. Crowdstrike, notably, was the firm the DNC hired to investigate the breach of its servers, and its findings were never independently verified by the FBI.

According to a message from Open Society Foundations executive Leonard Bernardo, a key Clinton ally, “the necessary information” would be disseminated through “leading U.S. publications” once it was passed through the FBI-affiliated firms. The email bluntly predicted that the FBI would “put more oil into the fire,” suggesting an expectation that federal agencies would play along.

The Durham findings further suggest that President Obama himself considered halting the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s private email server, a move that would have conveniently cleared the field for Clinton’s manufactured Trump-Russia narrative to dominate headlines.

Julianne Smith, who was the architect of this disinformation campaign, was later rewarded by the Biden administration with a high-level appointment as U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Her fingerprints on the Russia hoax only further underscore the Biden-Clinton nexus that ran through the intelligence and foreign policy apparatus during and after the 2016 election.

Durham wrote, “Smith was, at minimum, playing a role in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to tie Trump to Russia.” But as the newly declassified annex reveals, her role was far more active and strategic.

Senator Grassley condemned the Obama-era FBI for failing to act on the intelligence that Clinton’s campaign was planting false information. “The Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain,” Grassley said, citing the now-debunked Steele Dossier as a central piece of the operation.

FBI Director Kash Patel, who now leads the bureau under Trump’s second term, was blunt in his assessment: “This was one of the most shameful frauds ever perpetrated on the American public.”

Despite years of breathless media coverage, the Russia hoax yielded no evidence of criminal conspiracy. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation concluded with no findings of collusion. But by then, the damage was done—Trump’s presidency was undermined by a lie, Clinton’s emails were forgotten by the press, and trust in federal law enforcement had been severely eroded.

The newly unsealed intelligence confirms what conservatives had claimed all along: the Trump–Russia collusion narrative wasn’t just a hoax—it was a calculated act of political sabotage, greenlit by Hillary Clinton herself.