Classified Leaks Back in Focus in Russiagate Investigation

Senator Adam Schiff is the latest name to be dragged in to the ongoing Russiagate probe, but he likely won't be the last

John Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy at Just the News published what looks like an explosive piece, featuring notes from an FBI interview of a former Democratic House Intelligence Committee staffer turned whistleblower. The staffer was interviewed repeatedly over the years, most recently at the St. Louis Grand Hotel in May 2023, where he or she said this about onetime Intelligence Committee chair and current California Senator Adam Schiff:

When working in this capacity, [redacted] was called to an all-staff meeting by SCHIFF. In this meeting, SCHIFF stated the group would leak classified information which was derogatory to President of the United States DONALD J. TRUMP. SCHIFF stated the information would be used to indict President TRUMP.

“Schiff stated the group would leak classified information…”

The DOJ had these interviews for years, but they never surfaced, and FBI Director Kash Patel’s office only discovered them recently (“just last week” was a version I heard). It’s important to note that the existence of an official FBI “302” form summarizing an interview of a witness doesn’t mean the interviewee is correct, or that the information has been reviewed or investigated.

In this case, however, there’s good reason to look. The existence of a Schiff staffer who talked to federal investigators was referenced in a Justice Department Inspector General report released nine months ago, in December 2024. That was another investigation by Barack Obama appointee Michael Horowitz, into possible abuses by the Justice Department in Trump’s first term in searching for the origin of classified leaks to the Washington Post, CNN, and The New York Times in the “spring and summer of 2017.” The subject of those media reports? Russiagate.

There’s a complex story underlying that Horowitz report, as some sources believe that the DOJ 2017 leak investigation Horowitz examined was aimed not at news reporters but the Congressional investigators into Russiagate’s origins, who were also placed under surveillance at that time. (See “A True Bipartisan Scandal” in Racket last year.) Mainstream reporters contended the opposite, that the DOJ probe in 2017 was aimed at outlets like the Times, Post, and CNN that were publishing Trump-Russia bombshells.

For the moment, the key passage in last December’s report by Horowitz was about a “Committee Witness,” described as a “staffer from the Democratic staff” of a key committee, who claimed to have important information about “two Democratic members of Congress” leaking classified information:

The Committee Witness, who had been a staffer on the Democratic staff of one of the congressional committees that had been given access to the classified information, voluntarily told the FBI that the Committee Witness suspected that two Democratic Members of Congress… and a number of Democratic staffers could be leaking classified information on the same general subject matter as the classified information at issue in the Washington Post 2 leak.

The “general subject matter” was Russiagate. Horowitz identifies media items from spring and summer of 2017. Reportedly, these touched on matters like decisions of the FISA court and whether or not former Trump aide Carter Page had been judged to be an “agent of a foreign power.”

While some focused on that story’s factual issues — the FISA court only approved surveillance of Page because it had been lied to by the FBI, as Horowitz himself found in 2019 — there was also a serious security issue involved. FISA warrants are so secret that some experienced Hill investigators in the Page case had never seen one before, yet somehow material about it and other similarly sensitive subjects was getting out regularly at that time.

Former Senate Intelligence Committee head of security James Wolfe was criminally convicted for lying about contacts with a reporter, but that wasn’t the end of the matter. According to Horowitz, the “Committee Witness” told the FBI there was a widespread effort by members of Congress (Solomon identified the other member as Eric Swalwell) to push out classified material on this “subject matter”:

In an FBI interview, the Committee Witness told the FBI that the Committee Witness suspected that Member 1 had previously leaked classified information and that Member 2 wanted to influence public opinion via the release of classified information on the general subject matter area of the information leaked in the Washington Post 2 article. However, the Committee Witness offered no direct evidence that the Members disclosed the specific classified information that appeared in the article…

Horowitz didn’t find “direct evidence” that any member leaked classified information to the press during this time. However, the Horowitz report, coupled with Solomon’s story, makes it clear that a Democratic Party staffer did indeed talk to the FBI about this subject across multiple presidencies.

Solomon and Dunleavy detailed other FBI summaries of the whistleblower’s statements:

• Asked about the investigation into onetime Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, the source “opined” that “everything is directed at Trump and trying to get him impeached”;

• After Trump won the 2016 election, the mood within the Intelligence Committee was “indescribable,” and Schiff was said to be “particularly upset, as he believed he would have been appointed as the Director of the CIA” had Clinton won;

• The HPSCI minority “viewed the [2016] election and its aftermath as a constitutional crisis,” and “the Democratic minority leadership of HPSCI was aware of the leaks but was under the impression that leaking the information was one way to topple the administration and fix the constitutional crisis.”

The fact that someone was leaking classified information to friendly media outlets to drive high-profile Trump-Russia stories was one of the first concerns of investigators like Patel in the House Intelligence Committee under Devin Nunes, when they first started looking at the issue in 2017. I listed a number of the suspected instances in October 2019. Along with the aforementioned Page tale, they included stories like:

• The famed January 11, 2017 story by CNN, describing how John Brennan, James Comey, Jim Clapper, and Admiral Mike Rogers presented President-Elect Trump with material from a classified report annex about alleged Russian ability to blackmail him;

• The February 14, 2017 story citing “four current and former officials” who told the New York Times Trump’s campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence.

• A March 1, 2017 piece in the Washington Post about how Jeff Sessions “spoke twice” with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak;

• A January 19, 2019 piece about how “former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation” told the New York Times the FBI opened an inquiry into the “explosive implications” of whether or not Donald Trump was working on behalf of the Russians.

Why does this matter? These new releases don’t appear to be about embarrassing the likes of Schiff and Swalwell. Without knowing what kind of case the Trump administration is hoping to build, it appears illegal leaks of classified material are part of the picture, episodes they can “roll into the conspiracy,” as one source put it. What kind of conspiracy charge still isn’t clear, but Patel’s statements on the subject reveal that the same subject his investigators began with in 2017 has been revived.

“For years, certain officials used their positions to selectively leak classified information to shape political narratives,” Patel told Solomon and Dunleavy. “It was all done with one purpose: to weaponize intelligence and law enforcement for political gain.”

Solomon noted that another FBI 302 quoted a GOP source from the same committee, who said of the leaks that “this was not a one-time thing” and “under the system established” under Schiff, “notes would be run up to the ranking member… after which a decision was made as to who would leak the information.” There is evidence for this systemic leaking in the pages of news stories from 2017-2019 in particular. Will sources find these headlines used against them?

I’m in transit, but there’s apparently more detail about leaks about to be made public. If members of Congress didn’t leak that information, did authorities ever learn who did? If so, it doesn’t make sense that the public never found out who was to blame. If Reality Winner can go to jail for the same offense, why not intelligence officials or Hill staffers?