'Clinton Plan' emails were likely made by Russian spies, new documents show

Washington: The Trump-era special counsel who scoured the Russia investigation for wrongdoing gathered evidence that undermines a theory pushed by some Republicans that Hillary Clinton's campaign conspired to frame Donald Trump for colluding with Moscow in the 2016 election, information declassified on Thursday shows.

The information, a 29-page annex to the special counsel's 2023 report, reveals that a foundational document for that theory was most likely stitched together by Russian spies. The document is a purported email from July 27, 2016, that said Clinton had approved a campaign proposal to tie Trump to Russia to distract from the scandal over her use of a private email server.

The release of the annex adds new details to the public's understanding of a complex trove of 2016 Russian intelligence reports analyzing purported emails that Russian hackers stole from Americans. It also shows how the special counsel, John Durham, went to great lengths to try to prove that several of the emails were real, only to ultimately conclude otherwise.

The declassification is the latest disclosure in recent weeks concerning the Russia investigation. The wave has come as the administration is seeking to change the subject from its broken promise to release files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Even as the releases shed more light on a seismic political period nearly a decade ago, Trump and his allies have wildly overstated what the documents show, accusing former President Barack Obama of "treason."

The release of the annex was no exception. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, said in a statement that the materials proved that suspicions of Russian collusion stemmed from "a coordinated plan to prevent and destroy Donald Trump's presidency."

And Kash Patel, the FBI director, who has a long history of pushing false claims about the Russia investigation, declared on social media that the annex revealed "evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax."

In reality, the annex shows the opposite, indicating that a key piece of supposed evidence for the claim that Clinton approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia is not credible: Durham concluded that the email from July 27, 2016, and a related one dated two days earlier were probably manufactured.

Before the 2020 election, Ratcliffe, as director of national intelligence in Trump's first term, had declassified and released the crux of the July 27 email, even though he acknowledged doubts about its credibility. Officials did "not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication," he said.

Among some Trump supporters, the message became known as the "Clinton Plan intelligence," as Durham put it in his final report.

In his report, Durham used the U.S. government's knowledge of the supposed plan, via the Russian memos, to criticize FBI officials involved in the Russia investigation for not being more skeptical when they later received a copy of the Steele dossier and used it to obtain a wiretap order. The dossier, a compendium of Trump-Russia claims compiled by a former British spy, stemmed from a Democratic opposition research effort and was later discredited.

"Whether or not the Clinton Plan intelligence was based on reliable or unreliable information, or was ultimately true or false," Durham wrote, agents should have been more cautious when approaching material that appeared to have partisan origins.

Durham's report also mentioned that Clinton and others in the campaign dismissed the allegation as ridiculous, positing that it was Russian disinformation. But Durham banished to the annex concrete details he had found that bolstered her campaign's rebuttal, burying until now the conclusion that the email he called the "Clinton Plan intelligence" was almost certainly a product of Russian disinformation.

The annex shows that the person who supposedly sent the July 27 email, Leonard Benardo of the Open Society Foundations network, told Durham in 2021 that he had never seen the message and did not write it. The network is the philanthropic arm of liberal financier George Soros, who has been made out to be a villain by Russian state media and by some American conservatives.

The annex also cited a purported email from July 25, 2016, also attributed to Benardo. Referring to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the message claimed that a Clinton adviser was proposing a plan "to demonize Putin and Trump," adding, "Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire."

That message identified the adviser as "Julie," while the July 27 one said "Julia." An accompanying Russian intelligence memo identified the aide as Julianne Smith, a foreign policy adviser for the Clinton campaign who worked at the Center for a New American Security.

But the trove of Russian files contained two different versions of the July 25 message -- one that somehow had an additional sentence. And Benardo denied sending it, telling Durham's team that he did not know who "Julie" was and would not use a phrase like "pour more oil into the fire."

Smith informed Durham in 2021 that she had no memory of proposing anything to campaign leadership about attacking Trump over Russia, although she "recalled conversations with others in the campaign expressing their genuine concerns that the DNC hack was a threat to the electoral system, and that Trump and his advisers appeared to have troubling ties to Russia."

The annex also shows that Durham obtained emails from several liberal-leaning think tanks mentioned in the Russian memos and did not find copies of the messages supposedly written by Benardo. The think tanks included the Open Society Foundations, the Atlantic Council, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for a New American Security.

But Durham found other "emails, attachments and documents that contain language and references with the exact same or similar verbiage" to those messages. Those included a July 25 email by a Carnegie Endowment cyberexpert that contained an extensive passage about Russian hacking that was echoed, verbatim, in the purported July 25 message attributed to Benardo.

Durham also obtained text messages from Smith on July 25 showing that she had unsuccessfully tried to determine whether the FBI had opened an investigation into the Democratic National Committee breach, although they did not mention Trump. And he obtained a July 27 email from Smith asking her colleagues at the think tank to sign a bipartisan statement criticizing Trump's denunciations of the NATO alliance as reckless and too friendly to Russia.

Durham wrote that it would have been logical for someone to conclude that she played a role in efforts by the Clinton campaign to tie Trump to Russia. Her July 25 texts and July 27 email could be seen as support for the idea that such a plan existed, he added.

But ultimately, in weighing all the evidence, Durham concluded that the Russians had probably faked the key emails, the annex shows.

"The office's best assessment is that the July 25 and July 27 emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based think tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment and others," it says.

The Russian intelligence memos first came to public attention in 2017 after The New York Times and The Washington Post explored the decision by James Comey, then the FBI director, to violate Justice Department procedure. In publicly addressing the investigation into Clinton, he sharply criticized her use of a private email server but said no charges could be brought over it.

Comey later told Congress and an inspector general that he decided to be the face of the decision, rather than allowing Justice Department officials to do so, as is typical, in part because of something in the Russian memos. A Dutch spy agency had hacked the memos from a Russian spy agency's server in 2016 and gave copies to the U.S. government.

Two of the memos described purported communications in January 2016 and March 2016 involving a top Democratic Party leader, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, one with Benardo and the other with a different official at the Open Society Foundations. The memos indicated that the attorney general at the time, Loretta E. Lynch, was pressuring the FBI about the email inquiry and sharing confidential information about it with the Clinton campaign.

But Comey and other officials also said they believed that the memos described fake emails, in part because the January one also said that Comey himself was trying to help Republicans win the election. In 2017, Benardo and Wasserman Schultz said that they had never even met, let alone communicated about Clinton's emails.

The Trump administration has also declassified and released a report by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee that summarized unflattering claims about Clinton from the Russian memos without flagging suspicions that the trove contained misinformation.

After the special counsel investigating the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, Robert Mueller, issued his final report, the attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, assigned Durham to hunt for evidence proving Trump's conspiracy theory that the investigation had stemmed from a deep-state plot against him.

In 2020, as The New York Times has reported, after Durham failed to find evidence of intelligence abuses, he shifted to instead trying to find a basis to blame the Clinton campaign for the fact that Trump's campaign had come under suspicion of colluding with Russia.

Durham was never able to prove any Clinton campaign conspiracy to frame Trump by spreading information that it knew to be false about his ties to Russia, but he nevertheless used court filings and his final report to insinuate such suspicions. He brought charges of false statements against two people involved in outside efforts to scrutinize possible ties between Trump and Russia, both of which ended in quick acquittals.