https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/the-fbi-opened-a-secret-investigation
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The Trump White House has released a trove of newly declassified FBI documents which they say prove the FBI improperly targeted Donald Trump and further expose what President Trump has long described as the “Russia hoax.” After reading the actual documents, I came away with a very different conclusion.
The newly released records do not simply reopen the old debate over whether the FBI should have investigated Trump. They reveal something far more interesting: that in May 2017 the FBI opened a full counterintelligence investigation (as distinct from a criminal investigation) into whether the President of the United States himself might be acting on behalf of, or under the influence of, the Russian government. And they strongly suggest that this investigation—focused not on criminal guilt but on national security—was never completed.
That is a remarkable story.
The FBI’s opening memorandum states that the Bureau had an “articulable factual basis” to investigate whether President Trump “may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation.” It goes on to state the investigation’s objective even more explicitly: to determine whether Trump “is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with” Russia in a manner that posed a threat to the national security of the United States.
Those are extraordinary words that go far beyond the more familiar framing of the Mueller investigation, which focused primarily on whether Trump or his campaign had engaged in criminal coordination with Russia. This investigation was asking something altogether different: whether the President himself represented a counterintelligence threat to the United State
After the investigation was opened, within days, Mueller’s assignment was fundamentally criminal in nature. He was tasked with determining whether crimes had been committed—whether there had been criminal coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, whether obstruction of justice had occurred, and related offenses.
Counterintelligence asks a different question.
Instead of asking whether someone committed a prosecutable crime, counterintelligence asks whether a foreign adversary may possess influence, leverage, access, or even control over an American official in ways that threaten national security. Those questions might produce criminal charges; or they might not. But from a national securit point of view, they are among the most important questions an intelligence service can ask—and when they are being asked of the President himself, the importance sykrockets exponentially. And that’s what happened.
But, according to the newly released documents, once Mueller was appointed, the broader counterintelligence investigation was transferred to Mueller and was effectively swallowed up and sidelined by Mueller’s more narrow focus on criminal culpability. By 2019, the FBI quietly closed the original counterintelligence investigation without resolving the questions it asked.
So at a minimum, the newly released documents reveal that the United States government began investigating whether a sitting president posed a counterintelligence threat, based on a predicate that is fully articulated in the case opening memo—and then, almost immediately, shifted its focus elsewhere.
That alone makes these newly released documents well worth a deeper look.
What Made the FBI Open the Investigation?
One of the key documents released by the White House is the FBI’s Opening EC—short for Opening Electronic Communication. In FBI practice, an Opening EC is the formal memorandum used to open an investigation. Under FBI policy, it is the document in which agents are required to set out the factual predicate supporting the investigation and explain why they believe the the standard for opening a full investigation has been met.
That makes this an unusually important document. It is not a press release or an after-the-fact defense of the Bureau’s actions. It is the contemporaneous memorandum FBI officials prepared to justify opening one of the most extraordinary counterintelligence investigations in the Bureau’s history.
Under the heading “Basis for Investigation,” the memorandum opens with the Bureau’s conclusion:
The FBI has an articulable factual basis to believe that President Donald J. Trump may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation which may constitute a federal crime or threat to the national security.
That sentence is important because it is not itself the factual predicate. It is the FBI’s conclusion that the predicate existed.
The remainder of the Opening EC explains why Bureau officials believed they had reached that conclusion.
Rather than relying on any single event, the memorandum points to information developed during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, together with open-source reporting, that investigators believed justified opening a full counterintelligence investigation. It discusses Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, information that Russians had offered assistance to the Trump campaign, contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials that were already under investigation, Trump’s interactions with James Comey, and Trump’s longstanding business relationships involving Russia.
The memorandum also cites Trump’s business history in unusually direct language:
Open-source information indicates that President Trump has had longstanding business and real estate ties to Russia and the former Soviet states, stemming from the 1980s.
It then continues:
In 2008, President Trump’s son claimed that Russians made up a ‘disproportionate cross-section’ of many of President Trump’s assets. Open-source information also indicates that President Trump has had business ties in the United States and Russia with named Russian oligarchs.
Whether those facts ultimately justified opening a counterintelligence investigation into a sitting president is, and will remain, a matter of legitimate debate.
But one thing becomes clear from reading the Opening EC itself: the FBI did not present the Comey firing as the sole basis for the investigation. The Bureau documented what it believed was a broader body of intelligence, investigative information, and publicly available evidence that, taken together, established the “articulable factual basis” required to begin asking one of the most consequential counterintelligence questions imaginable.
Among the factors cited were the Intelligence Community’s assessment that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump; evidence that Russians had offered assistance to the Trump campaign; the campaign’s efforts to soften the Republican Party platform on Ukraine; Trump’s long history of business dealings involving Russia and former Soviet states; public statements by Donald Trump Jr. concerning Russian investment in the Trump Organization; and contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials that had already become the focus of Crossfire Hurricane.
Whether those facts ultimately justified opening a counterintelligence investigation into a sitting president is a matter reasonable people can debate.
But it is important to understand what the FBI was—and was not—doing.
The Bureau was not claiming it had evidence proving Donald Trump was a Russian agent.
It was saying that, taken together, these facts created sufficient concern to justify asking one of the gravest questions in American counterintelligence: whether the President of the United States might, knowingly or unknowingly, be acting in ways that served the interests of a hostile foreign power.
(MS Comment: This dovetails completely with questions that people like Craig Unger, myself, and others have been asking in the independent media universe, particularly over the past year and a half since a former KGB Agent Almur Mussayev made claims that Trump was recruited in the 1980s and given the code name “Krasnov.” See A Deeper Look at Claims by a KGB Officer That Trump was Recruited by the KGB in the 1980s.)
The Investigation That Disappeared
Had events followed their natural course, the FBI would presumably have continued investigating the question posed in its Opening EC: whether President Trump represented a counterintelligence threat to the United States.
Instead, everything changed the very next day.
On May 17, 2017—just one day after the FBI formally opened the counterintelligence investigation—Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel.
Most Americans assume that Mueller simply took over the investigation.
The newly released documents suggest that is only partly true.
Mueller’s mandate was structured in such a way that the counterintelligence investigation did not fit particularly well within that mandate. Mueller’s mandate was fundamentally criminal in nature. He was directed to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, any criminal coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, possible obstruction of justice, and crimes arising from those matters.
That is a very different mission from the one the FBI had assigned itself the day before in the Opening EC of the counterintelligence investigation.
What happened next is detailed in the newly released closing memorandum. That memorandum, issued when the investigation was closed in 2019, explains what happened. Responsibility for the investigation was transferred to FBI personnel assigned to Mueller’s office. But the memorandum adds a critical sentence that has received remarkably little attention:
The investigation was limited to activities within the scope of the Special Counsel’s jurisdiction.
That one sentence may explain why the counterintelligence investigation effectively disappeared.
The question posed in the Opening EC was never simply whether Donald Trump had committed crimes. It was whether he might be “directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with” Russia in a manner that posed a threat to national security. The focus was on the national security of the United States, not criminal conduct by Donald Trump. There can be overlap between the two areas, but they are distinct.
Those are not the same question.
By April 2019, the FBI quietly closed the original counterintelligence investigation.
How Significant Is This?
Partisan politics aside, what these documents do is expose the difference between a criminal investigation and a counterintelligence investigation, and they demonstrate that career professionals at the FBI saw and reacted to facts that rose to the level, in their view, of predicating a counterintelligence investigation.
A criminal investigator asks: Did someone commit a crime, and can I prove it beyond a reasonable doubt?
A counterintelligence officer asks something very different: Is a foreign intelligence service gaining influence over an American official? Is that official vulnerable to recruitment, manipulation, coercion, financial leverage, or some other form of foreign influence?
Those questions often overlap. But they are not the same.
In fact, many of the most serious counterintelligence concerns never result in criminal charges. That’s not the focus. An American official may become compromised without wittingly committing a crime. He or she might maintain compromising financial relationships, become susceptible to foreign manipulation, or repeatedly advance the interests of a hostile power without ever violating a criminal statute and without even being a witting, cooperating agent of that power. There is an entire spectrum of influence possible by the foreign power — the term “useful idiot” comes to mind. On another level, “witting collaborator” where a peson collaborates but is not controlled. And then there is “recruited agent.” That last level is what most people think of, but all fo those levels are relevant from a counterintelligence viewpoint. And that’s what FBI saw as being in play — the clear potential for undue influence, possibly criminal, possibly not. But still a threat to US National Security.
That is why the FBI’s Opening EC is so striking.
It was not attempting to determine simply whether Donald Trump had broken the law. It was asking whether the President of the United States himself represented a counterintelligence threat to the country.
That is among the gravest questions the American intelligence community can ask.
Whether the FBI ultimately had enough evidence to sustain that concern is an entirely separate question.
But once that question was formally asked, one would ordinarily expect the government to pursue it until it reached a clear answer.
According to the newly released documents, that never really happened.
Conclusion
The release of these documents is significant because it gives us something we have never had before: the FBI’s own contemporaneous explanation of why it believed a full counterintelligence investigation of the President of the United States was warranted, together with documents showing what became of that investigation.
Those documents tell a story that is more nuanced than the political narratives now competing to define them.
They show that the FBI believed it had accumulated sufficient information to justify asking one of the most consequential counterintelligence questions imaginable. They also show that, almost as soon as that investigation was opened, its trajectory changed. Responsibility shifted to the Special Counsel, whose mandate was necessarily focused on criminal investigations and criminal liability. By 2019, the original counterintelligence investigation had been closed.
Whether the FBI’s concerns were well-founded is a question people will continue to debate. Whether Mueller’s narrower criminal mandate was the appropriate vehicle for addressing those concerns is another.
What the newly released documents establish beyond dispute is that these were never the same investigation.
One sought to determine whether crimes had been committed.
The other sought to determine whether the President of the United States posed a counterintelligence risk to the country.
That second question lies at the heart of the newly released documents. It is what the FBI believed it was investigating in May 2017. It is also the question that, after reading those documents carefully, I am left thinking deserves far more attention than it has received.
Audio listeners can stop here.
Sources
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-
https://www.justice.gov/
https://www.justice.gov/
https://www.justice.gov/
https://www.justice.gov/
https://www.justice.gov/
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/
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