Vice President JD Vance said in an interview airing Sunday that a lot of people would be indicted for “aggressive violations of the law” during the Russiagate scandal, arguing that those involved needed to face consequences for “defrauding” the American people.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents and a memo on July 18 detailing what she described as a “years-long coup” against President Donald Trump after he defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. Vance told “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo that Obama administration officials “defrauded” Americans with false claims Trump colluded with Russia.
“Do you want to see indictments?” Bartiromo asked Vance, who responded, “Absolutely, Maria. Look, of course you’ve got to have the law follow the facts here. You don’t just indict people to indict people, you indict people because they broke the law. But if you look at what Tulsi and [FBI Director] Kash Patel have revealed in the last couple of weeks, I don’t know how anyone can look at that and say there wasn’t aggressive violations of the law.”
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“What they basically did was they defrauded the American people in order to take Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign talking points and turn them into intelligence by defrauding the American people, defrauding the intelligence agencies, lying about what the intel said,” Vance continued. “They would take something that supported a Hillary Clinton campaign talking point, and they would overemphasize it and exaggerate it. They took anything that actually contradicted that narrative, and they buried it deep and through that, they actually laundered Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign talking points through the American intelligence services.”
Special Counsel John Durham released a May 2023 report on the origins of the FBI investigation of allegations that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia that found that the FBI “did not and could not corroborate” the claims from the now-discredited Steele Dossier, which was used to obtain warrants to monitor communications by Carter Page and other associates of Trump. FBI analyst Brian Auten testified in an October 2022 trial that the FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million if he could corroborate the claims in the dossier, but Steele never did.
“I absolutely think they broke the law. You’re going to see a lot of people get indicted for that. Here’s the thing that should really bother the American people, what do you want our intelligence community to be doing? I want them to be catching bad guys. I want them to be making sure that terrorists aren’t going to kill innocent civilians,” Vance said. “I don’t want them laundering Hillary Clinton’s campaign talking points into the American media and giving them this air of legitimacy. It is sick and it’s disgusting. It hurt the intelligence community, it hurt the American people, and it hurt the first Trump Administration. We’ve got to have consequences for it.”
The dossier created by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele was repeatedly cited on CNN, MSNBC and other corporate media outlets to advance the unproven claims that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential race partially due to Russian interference in the election. Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee were fined by the Federal Election Commission in 2022 for their involvement in the since-discredited dossier, which was used to further allegations of collusion, CNN reported.
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