“The FBI Lied.” A Decade of Democrat Lawfare Against Donald Trump.

The FBI director said it on the record. On a podcast.

On May 6, 2026, on the “Hang Out with Sean Hannity” podcast, FBI Director Kash Patel described the predicate and execution of the bureau’s surveillance of the Trump 2016 campaign in the most direct language any sitting FBI director has used about his own institution: a political party, he said, “hire[d] some bogus intelligence asset” abroad to manufacture “fraudulent, fake, unverified information,” funneled it to the FBI, and used that material to obtain secret surveillance warrants against the opposition party’s presidential nominee.

“The FISA court themselves came back and said these warrants were illegal. The FBI did not provide evidence of exculpatory evidence and innocence and that the FBI essentially lied in those applications and all the information was unverified.”

FBI Director Kash Patel — Hang Out with Sean Hannity, May 6, 2026

Patel named the officials who signed the warrants: James Comey (FBI Director), Sally Yates (D) (Acting AG, then Deputy AG), and Rod Rosenstein (Deputy AG). Patel said his own phone records were obtained under the same regime. The point of the podcast appearance was not commentary; it was confession on behalf of the institution he now runs. The FBI’s own director, in 2026, called the FISA applications dishonest and the resulting surveillance illegal.

A locked room. Not on the blueprints.

One day before the FISA confession, Patel told Hannity he had located — physically — an undocumented secured room inside FBI headquarters in Washington containing multiple “burn bags.” (A burn bag is the bureau’s term for a heavy paper bag in which classified material is collected for incineration.) The room, Patel said, did not appear on the FBI’s own building blueprints. Initially, no one could access it.

The contents, per Patel: thousands of pages of sensitive Crossfire Hurricane material that should have been turned over to oversight investigators years ago and never was. Former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, who had previously discussed the room on the same podcast, called it “the mother lode.” Patel told The Epoch Times: “You’re going to see everything we found in that room in one way or another, be it through investigation, public trial, or disclosure to the Congress.”

The Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for the dossier. The FEC fined them for hiding it.

The intelligence asset Patel referred to is Christopher Steele, a former MI6 Russia-desk officer hired through Fusion GPS. The money trail is no longer disputed. In April 2016, the Hillary for America campaign and the Democratic National Committee — through their shared law firm Perkins Coie and its election partner Marc Elias (D) — routed roughly $1.02 million to Fusion GPS, which paid Steele approximately $168,000 through his firm Orbis Business Intelligence in London.

The campaign and the DNC reported these payments on FEC filings as “legal services” and “legal and compliance consulting” rather than what they were: opposition research. After complaints and litigation, the FEC concluded in 2022 that the disclosure had been improper. The DNC was fined $105,000; the Clinton campaign was fined $8,000. (FEC MURs 7291 and 7449, closed 2022.)

“The bulk of the information in the dossier was general Russian/D.C. political 'word of mouth' and rumors — not collected intelligence.”

Igor Danchenko (Steele's primary sub-source) — FBI interview, Jan 2017 · Durham Report Ch. 5

Steele’s “primary sub-source,” Igor Danchenko, was a Russian-born Brookings analyst the FBI had itself previously investigated as a possible Russian intelligence contact (2009–2011). When the bureau interviewed him in January 2017 — before three of the four FISA renewals — Danchenko said the dossier’s claims were rumor and hearsay. The FBI obtained the renewals anyway.

17 errors. A forged CIA email. Two warrants ruled invalid.

Eighteen days before the 2016 election, on October 21, 2016, the FBI obtained its first FISA warrant against Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign-policy advisor. It was renewed three times over the next twelve months — even after Steele was fired as a source for talking to the press, even after Danchenko told the FBI the dossier was rumor.

The DOJ Inspector General’s December 2019 report identified 17 significant errors and material omissions across the four applications. FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty in August 2020 to altering a CIA email so that it falsely said Carter Page was “not a source” for the agency. The original CIA reply had said the opposite. That forgery was used to obtain the fourth FISA renewal. Clinesmith received 12 months probation. He served zero days in prison. He is the only person criminally convicted in the entire Crossfire Hurricane operation.

On January 7, 2020, presiding FISA-court Judge James Boasberg signed an order, declassified later that month, in which the government conceded that the authorizations in dockets 17-375 and 17-679 — the third and fourth Page warrants — were not valid. That is the FISA court itself, in writing, saying the surveillance had been illegal.

$32 million. 22 months. 19 lawyers. No collusion.

After Trump fired Comey in May 2017, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller Special Counsel to take over the investigation Crossfire Hurricane had begun. Twenty-two months and roughly $32 million later, Mueller’s 448-page report concluded that the investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” There was no charged conspiracy. There was no charged coordination. The central claim that justified two and a half years of investigation was unproven.

That should have ended the matter. It was the beginning.

A phone call to Zelensky. Acquitted, 52–48.

Six months after Mueller closed his probe, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) opened the second front. The trigger was a July 25, 2019 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked Zelensky to look into the conduct of his political opponent’s son, Hunter Biden, on the board of Burisma. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) ran the inquiry; the House voted articles on December 18, 2019 along largely party lines.

The Senate trial concluded on February 5, 2020. Trump was acquitted: 48–52 on abuse of power and 47–53 on obstruction of Congress. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) was the only Republican who voted to convict on count one.

Impeached one week before he left office. Acquitted again, 57–43.

On January 13, 2021 — one week before Trump’s term expired — the House voted a single article of impeachment for “incitement of insurrection” over the January 6 Capitol breach. The Senate trial began February 9, after Trump was already a private citizen, on a question the Constitution had never before been asked: can a former President be tried by the Senate? On February 13, the Senate voted 57–43 to convict — ten short of the two-thirds threshold. Acquittal.

The political point was clear regardless of the legal one: impeach a candidate twice and at least make him answer for it in the next campaign. He won anyway, in 2024, after surviving everything that followed.

FBI agents at the home of a former president. Then dismissed for unconstitutional appointment.

On August 8, 2022, roughly 30 FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, the residence of a former U.S. president. The operations order, later disclosed in court, authorized agents to use deadly force in accordance with standard policy. Agents searched the master bedroom, including former First Lady Melania Trump’s and Barron Trump’s rooms, and removed roughly 13,000 documents, of which about 300 were marked classified. AG Merrick Garland (D) appointed Jack Smith special counsel in November 2022.

On June 8, 2023, Smith brought a 40-count federal indictment in the Southern District of Florida. Trump pleaded not guilty. On July 15, 2024, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case in its entirety, ruling that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional under the Appointments Clause. After Trump’s November 2024 election win, Smith dropped both his federal cases against Trump in light of the Office of Legal Counsel’s long-standing position that a sitting president cannot be federally prosecuted.

Three Democrat prosecutors. One conviction. Each one cratered.

With the federal cases stalled, three Democratic state prosecutors went on offense in the months before the 2024 election. None held up.

Three Democratic state prosecutors brought four indictments, one civil fraud action, and one RICO case. As of May 2026: James’s judgment is voided; Willis is disqualified; Smith’s federal cases are dismissed and dropped; Bragg won a conviction whose foundation the New York appellate courts have yet to rule on. The pattern is hard to miss.

Horowitz. Boasberg. Durham. Cannon. The Appellate Division. Five separate vindications.

These are not partisan media judgments. These are the conclusions of federal inspectors-general, federal judges, FISA-court orders, and state appellate panels.

Ten years. Two impeachments. Four indictments. One civil fraud. He won the 2024 election.

Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 having outlasted every legal instrument that had been marshaled against him. The Steele dossier was discredited on the FBI’s own record. The FISA court rescinded two of four warrants. Mueller found nothing. Two impeachments ended in acquittal. Smith’s case was dismissed for unconstitutional appointment. James’s judgment was voided as an unconstitutional fine. Willis was disqualified. The Bragg conviction is still on appeal, and it rests on a legal theory NYU and Harvard law-school faculty have publicly questioned.

On May 6, 2026, his FBI director described what happened in plain English on a podcast: the FBI lied. The bureau’s own former leadership was cited 17 times for significant FISA errors, fired for false statements (McCabe), pleaded guilty for forging a CIA email (Clinesmith), and is now the subject of an ongoing disclosure operation centered on a locked room that did not appear on the bureau’s blueprints.

“I was the victim of the worst and most illegal abuse of FISA in our Nation's History, by Radical Left Lunatics, who lied to the FISA Court to spy on my 2016 Presidential Campaign.”

President Donald J. Trump — Truth Social, April 14, 2026

The site’s editorial position is unchanged from the first publication of the Russia-collusion file: every defendant in a pending criminal case is presumed innocent. But the Crossfire Hurricane prosecutions are not pending. They are over. And the verdict of the federal judges, the inspectors-general, the FISA court, the appellate division, and the special counsel who reviewed the FBI’s own conduct — that verdict is unanimous. The case against the case against Trump is closed.