President Donald Trump has demanded jail time for the spies who accused him of colluding with Russia
The US Department of Justice has reportedly issued a fresh round of subpoenas, as it continues to investigate the campaign by President Donald Trump’s opponents to undermine his 2016 victory with claims of “Russian interference.”
The move was reported by the Associated Press on Wednesday, citing anonymous sources within the Justice Department. According to these sources, the department is seeking documents compiled since January 2017, when US intelligence agencies issued a statement alleging that Russia conspired with the Trump campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
It is unclear whether the subpoenas will lead to any criminal charges.
The 2017 statement, issued jointly by all 17 US intelligence agencies, claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally “approved and directed” a cyber-warfare and influence campaign against the Clinton campaign. Controversially, it included in its appendices a summary of the so-called ‘Steele dossier’, a Democrat-funded report compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
Steele’s primary source later admitted that he fed Steele a collection of “rumor and speculation,” and a report by White House Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Back in November, the Justice Department subpoenaed former CIA Director John Brennan and other officials involved in producing the January 2017 assessment. Brennan told a 2023 Congressional hearing that the CIA “was not involved at all with” the decision to include the Steele dossier in the assessment. Republican lawmakers claim that this was a lie, and referred Brennan to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution last October.
Trump has maintained for years that the ‘Russiagate’ investigation was a politically-motivated “witch hunt” designed to undermine his first term in office, and has demanded retribution against those involved. “What they did is a disgrace,” he told reporters last year. “They should be [arrested] because they’re crooked and they got caught.”
While the investigation began in 2017, the FBI used the Steele dossier a year earlier to obtain a warrant to wiretap Trump’s campaign. The Justice Department’s inspector general later found that former FBI Director James Comey omitted key information when he was applying for the warrant, which would have resulted in its rejection.
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