Part TWO
Whistleblower Allegations
The FBI whistleblower claimed that within 24 hours of Democratic House Intelligence Committee member Eric Swalwell receiving a CIA document, some of the information in it appeared “almost verbatim” in a July 1, 2017, article by Harris that referred to “Russian hackers.” Published under the headline, “GOP Activist Who Sought Clinton Emails Cited Trump Campaign Officials,” the story by Harris and several colleagues cited as sources, “U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence.”
“[CIA] officials descended upon HPSCI’s offices, threatening to stop providing information unless the leaking ended,” recounted the FBI’s summary of the whistleblower interview.
The committee whistleblower suspected Swalwell “played a role in the leak,” noting the California Democrat “previously had been warned to be careful because he had a reputation for leaking classified information.” An outspoken Trump critic, Swalwell has denied being the source of leaks.
Shane Harris, who later jumped to the Washington Post before recently landing at The Atlantic, did not respond to requests for comment.
FBI investigators wrote that the committee whistleblower “advised it is likely the leaks are being conducted through cutouts.” They added, “He believed some individuals may be using their spouse’s phones to contact the media” and “conceal” their leaks.
One of these individuals was believed to be Schiff’s staff director, Michael Bahar, a Democrat and former Obama adviser who led the committee’s investigation into Russiagate and became the FBI’s prime suspect in its leak investigation.
During a February 2017 committee meeting, the whistleblower told FBI agents that Bahar “instructed the staff to collect information from the USIC [U.S. Intelligence Community] for purposes of making it public.”
After Bahar left the committee in June 2017, the whistleblower alleged, he continued to leak information he received from a protege he placed on the panel to “relay” classified material. While the protege’s name is hidden under redactions, authorities confirmed the staffer is Thomas Eager.
“[Eager] functioned as [Bahar’s] insider at the committee,” according to an FBI report, even though “committee rules prohibited communications with former staffers on official matters.”
“He [Eager] tells [Bahar] what he learned and [Bahar] takes it to the media,” the whistleblower alleged in an August 2017 FBI interview.
No charges were filed against either Eager or Bahar, who did not reply to requests for comment.
Ineffective Investigations
Declassified documents show that the FBI and DOJ launched no fewer than seven classified leak investigations that centered on 2017 reporting on the Russiagate investigation. They targeted several high-ranking Obama officials, two Democratic members of Congress – Schiff and Swalwell – and more than three dozen Hill staffers from both parties (including now-FBI Director Kash Patel, then a House intel lawyer for chairman Devin Nunes), along with numerous journalists who were on the receiving end of the leaks.
None of the probes led to a single prosecution for espionage or mishandling secrets.
Critics say the investigations – conducted under the leadership of Comey’s deputy Andrew McCabe, who was himself investigated by DOJ’s IG for leaking classified information to the media – were botched, likely on purpose.
“There hasn’t been nearly enough transparency on why those investigations didn’t result in any accountability for those responsible,” said Jason Foster, a former Republican staffer who served as chief investigative counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley. Foster said DOJ subpoenaed his personal phone and email records while he worked on the Hill in 2017.
Seizing the communications records of suspected leakers and journalists was crucial to identifying the sources of the leaks in the massive conspiracy against Trump. But in their search warrants, investigators failed to include among the records they sought the deleted texts from the encrypted Signal app used by reporters and leakers, which they could have obtained by seizing cell phones.
And the telephone records they did obtain included only the phone numbers of the calls made to and from the targeted device over the specified time period, and the duration of the calls, but excluded what was texted in those phone calls. What’s more, the emails taken included just the metadata, not the content of the messages. The warrants covered only “non-content communication records.”
Also, “the government did not seek local and long-distance telephone records for the two members of Congress” – Schiff and Swalwell, according to a December 2024 review of the FBI’s investigative efforts by former Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. “The compulsory process did not seek the content of any of their communications.”
In the Nakashima probe, agents oddly limited their search of her phone records to the period from April 15, 2017, to July 31, 2017, which meant that any contacts with House or Senate intel leakers prior to her April 11, 2017, story on the Page FISA warrants would not have been discovered. More curious, investigators never obtained any records from her work email accounts, despite the court’s approval of such searches.
Agents also failed to obtain even the logs of the Google emails of Schmidt and three other New York Times reporters in their investigations of classified leaks to the Times in 2017, even though a judge authorized giving investigators access to the data.
The IG report said allegations from the “committee witness” – believed to be Minehart – “were not ultimately substantiated.” However, agents failed to pursue the phone records for some of the spouses whose phones were used by staffers he accused of leaking. And they never sought any of the phone records for an additional staffer ID’d by Minehart.
And while investigators focused on former Schiff staff director and general counsel Bahar as a prime leak suspect, they failed to obtain any of his emails while he served on the committee. The scope of their Google email search began after he left the House in June 2017.
A Curious Claim
Declassified FBI memos suggest that the bureau’s investigation was blunted by an unnamed House Intelligence Committee lawyer who advanced the curious claim that both members and congressional aides had immunity from criminal prosecution under the Constitution’s “speech or debate clause.”
The investigators’ deference to this novel notion apparently hampered the probe of Bahar, who visited the “read room” with the classified material in early 2017 and subsequently made contact by phone with Nakashima and other Post reporters who authored the articles that disclosed classified information, according to the IG report.
“To avoid gathering information that the Speech or Debate Clause would protect, the Google search warrant sought records beginning on the date the Senior Committee Staffer [Bahar] departed from government service,” the IG report said.
Investigators also limited what Apple phone records of Bahar they could use as evidence by applying “filter procedures to review the contents of the search warrant returns to segregate Speech or Debate material and attorney-client privileged material,” the report said.
In his report, then-DOJ IG Horowitz said that agents and prosecutors “ultimately determined that [Bahar] likely did not leak the classified information to the reporters and the investigation was closed without any charges being filed.” The IG report said that the search warrant application for Bahar’s records noted that the “Committee Witness” — Minehart — was of “unknown reliability.”
FBI documents indicate the New York Times leak investigation was opened by Joseph Pientka, the supervisory special agent who initially ran the Russiagate probe against Trump out of bureau headquarters. And the leak probe was overseen by DOJ official David Laufman, the Obama appointee and Democratic Party campaign donor who charged several Trump advisers under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Though the statute of limitations may be close to expiring, federal law enforcement sources say FBI Director Patel is considering reopening the leak investigations. The statutory clock for prosecuting the federal offense of disclosing classified information runs ten years. And there is no period of limitation for prosecuting espionage cases.
The evidence gathered from the investigations has not been destroyed, according to the IG report. Digital copies of the communications records obtained are stored in the FBI’s case management system, known as Sentinel, and hard copies are retained in a locked filing cabinet.
Media Collusion
Since Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard essentially reopened the Russiagate story by declassifying hundreds of pages of documents exposing how the Obama administration’s intelligence was manufactured against Trump, the Washington Post and other major media have largely refused to report the story they once covered zealously.
They’ve even blacked out the claims of a former top ODNI cyber-analyst who said he was “pressured” to change his assessments about Russian election influence to fit the anti-Trump narrative.
“The same media that breathlessly reported every unverified claim in the Steele dossier now demands ‘context’ and ‘corroboration’ when faced with damning primary documents,” said Peter Flaherty, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center in Washington. “This double standard – embracing unverified gossip when it suits their narrative but dismissing hard evidence when it doesn’t – reveals a media more interested in protecting Democratic allies than pursuing truth.”
For her part, Nakashima has trained her investigative sights on Gabbard, who claims the Post reporter has been “stalking” and “harassing” her and her staff, while calling intelligence officials from a “burner phone” to disguise her identity while trying to entice them into sharing derogatory information about Gabbard.
Some New York Times and Washington Post alumni who have won Pulitzers for covering previous national security issues say they’re disappointed that their former colleagues aren’t doing more to cover the declassification of Intelligence Community documents, which strongly suggest that the Trump-Russia “collusion” scandal was fabricated for political reasons.
“The documents that came out in the past couple of months are jaw-dropping. It’s rare to see such slam-dunk evidence of a conspiracy,” said former Washington Post investigative reporter Susan Schmidt. “But the entire mainstream media have been operating from an anti-Trump agenda, and they are not reporting on the exposé of the hoax that’s coming out.”
Former New York Times Pulitzer winner Jeff Gerth agreed: “The media aren’t looking for Russiagate [hoax] scoops, nor will they fairly present the ones others get if they reflect poorly on their prior reporting.”
“They’re in a defensive posture and aren’t inclined to report deeply on anything that helps Trump,” he explained.
Tim Graham said the release of FBI leak records proves the real scandal was never Russia collusion but “media collusion” – the collaboration between legacy media journalists and federal government malcontents who shared a common goal of knee-capping Trump.
Even though declassified documents expose their incestuous ties, Graham added, “these journalists still shamelessly pretend they didn’t collude with their fellow liberals at government agencies to undermine their domestic enemy Trump at every turn.”
