It’s not shocking that Rolling Stone would do this, but it’s still a bit jarring to see that they have zero shame. They claim—get this—that the new Russian collusion documents that have been released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) were manufactured by Moscow. That’s right—all the files showing a massive seditious conspiracy by Democrats and the media is a Kremlin operation. I must laugh at this sloppy, brain-dead attempt at gaslighting and pivoting. The game is over, kids. You lost.
Next-level gaslighting pic.twitter.com/wk09LSiY0B
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) August 2, 2025
It’s genuinely embarrassing what Rolling Stone has become. https://t.co/X6VGi52Y1H
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) August 2, 2025
Grassley released the declassified appendix to the Durham report, which was the investigation into the origins of the Russian collusion hoax, which was recently discovered in a burn bag, along with thousands of other related documents, by FBI Director Kash Patel (via Rolling Stone):
Donald Trump and his allies are throwing every bucket of chum they can at their base in their ongoing efforts to distract from the administration’s bungling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and this time they may have caught a fish that’s too big to fry. Following a request from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the FBI and DOJ agreed to declassify the so-called “Durham Annex,” a 29-page appendix to the Durham Report.
The annex was made public on Thursday, with FBI Director Kash Patel claiming it was part of a hidden trove of documents “buried in a back room at the FBI” that contained classified “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.”
It contained no such evidence, but that didn’t matter to the Trump allies desperate to cast prominent Democratic figures as anti-American criminals.
The original Durham Report was released by Trump-appointed Special Council John Durham in 2023, and examined the evidence underlying the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Durham was unable to find proof that the FBI or other government entities engaged in prosecutable misconduct targeting Trump. The president and his allies have nevertheless continued to try (and fail) to prove Democratic misconduct related to the investigation, while alleging Barack Obama and others should be indicted for treason over the “hoax.”
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It did contain that evidence, which, coupled with the two document dumps from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, shows the most extensive intelligence operation in American history was inflicted upon us to cover the mess left by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. That email server she had while serving as Obama’s Secretary of State turned out to be a significant issue, which Matt Taibbi, a former contributing editor to Rolling Stone, expounded about at length over at Racket:
With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes.
One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme. The last stage required the enthusiastic cooperation and canine incuriosity of the entire commercial news business, which cheered as conspirators made an enforcement target of Trump, actually an irrelevant bystander.
I’ve tiptoed for years around what I believed to be true about this case, worrying some mitigating fact might emerge. Now, there’s no doubt. Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it. It was a cover-up, plain and simple…
At the outset of 2016, Hillary Clinton was in a world of self-inflicted hurt. Having put her entire life as Secretary of State onto a private server, opening up the possibility for an unprecedented penetration of American cybersecurity, she was facing a grave and damaging federal investigation. The story that she “chose not to keep” (read: delete) over 30,000 emails had been broken the previous year, and the details were appalling, with private computer specialist Paul Combetta belatedly wiping them out in what he called an “oh, shit” moment, three weeks after the issuance of a Congressional subpoena.
Clinton’s position was so unsteady by early 2016 that she made Bernie Sanders a real challenger for the Democratic nomination, losing New Hampshire in a landslide and essentially tying in Iowa, where she somehow lost 84% of the vote of women under 30. This was in addition to other problems, like an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation that had been “put on hold” until after the 2016 vote, creeping issues with donors, and negative publicity around husband Bill. This forced her to scramble to do damage-control interviews, many of which just did more damage…
[…]
On top of all this, a cache of correspondence that the Justice Department Inspector General would later describe as “data exfiltrated…from various U.S. victims, including the Executive Office of the President (EoP), the State Department, the U.S. House of Representatives, [and] other federal agencies” had fallen into Russian hands. It contained material potentially very damaging to Clinton. Authorities were soon forced to plan for the possibility that it would get out.
This is the backdrop for the most key piece of information in the classified appendix to the investigation of Special Counsel Durham, whose probe fizzled with a semi-whimper in 2023, describing materials that “individuals affiliated with Russian intelligence services” hacked at some point prior to January 2016. What you need to know: Russians had a pile of emails and correspondence involving “government agencies, non-profit organizations, and think-tanks based in the United States.”
This pile of material ostensibly contained information about conversations between DNC chief Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and two members of the Open Society Foundation, Jeffrey Goldstein and Leonard Benardo. A Russian analysis of these communications described how investigations of possible preferential treatment of Clinton Foundation donors by the Department of State caused a “significant negative reaction” for Clinton within the party, and that Barack Obama was unwilling to “darken the final part of his presidency” with a scandal involving his successor.
I would say get better sources, but this is Rolling Stone. It’s the magazine that ran with a fake gang rape hoax at the University of Virginia, got sued over it, and lost. It’s astounding they still do stuff like this.
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