New Russiagate Documents Expose Media/Government Collusion
By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations
September 16, 2025
Kristina Flour
Recently declassified documents indicate that people close to former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff were connected to leaks of classified information to prominent reporters designed to portray Donald Trump and his allies as being in league with Russia.??
Reporters from the New York Times and Washington Post shared a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for articles that used classified leaks to advance the Russigate hoax.
Columbia University, Photo by Eileen Barroso
Written in 2017, the FBI documents expose how selected Washington reporters, including Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, scored a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning scoops in 2017 by repeating false and inflammatory leaks during President Trump’s first term.??
Much of their reporting has been debunked – and shown to be part of a smear campaign by high-ranking officials to undermine Trump, but the identities of those leakers have remained hidden because of the government’s apparent unwillingness to expose its own and the refusal of reporters to identify the people who misled them and the nation. ??
Although the heavily redacted recent disclosures do not specifically identify the suspected leakers, an RCI analysis of the documents strongly suggests that people close to Comey and Schiff, among others, were feeding the reporters information to advance the Russiagate hoax.??
The documents reveal a cascade of misdeeds and failures. These include the effort of government officials to create and leak misleading classified information to favored reporters and the failure of reporters to scrutinize the information they were given before rushing it into print; and the subsequent failure of federal investigators to hold anyone accountable for the breaches of security.??
The documents also detail the incestuous nature of media-government relationships inside the D.C. Beltway. In some cases, spouses and friends of government officials and reporters were used to spread damaging misinformation about Trump, making it difficult for federal investigators to follow the trail of illegal disclosures.??
“All of these cozy friendships of leakers and leaker recipients, many of whom are married to each other, are precisely why reporters adore hiding their sourcing behind walls of ‘senior administration officials’ or ‘senior U.S. officials’ and associated disguises,” said Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the Media Research Center, a Washington-based journalism watchdog group.???
‘Topple the Administration’?
FBI documents suggest Rep. Adam Schiff weaponized U.S. intelligence to smear Trump in the media.
AP
The new disclosures include the previously sealed testimony of an FBI informant who’d worked on the Democratic side of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for more than a decade, who told agents that “all hell broke loose” after Trump’s surprising 2016 election win. In February 2017, he asserted, Schiff, then a House member, hatched a plan to weaponize U.S. intelligence to smear Trump in the media as a Kremlin conspirator with the goal of triggering his impeachment. Schiff was the ranking Democratic member of the committee at the time.??
“Leaking the information was one way to topple the administration,” the source told the FBI in August 2017, adding that “everything is directed at Trump and trying to get him impeached.”??
To that end, Schiff formed a “Russia team” within the committee to view and disseminate classified material on Trump that it requested from the CIA and FBI, the informant said. Main team members allegedly included Schiff staffers Rheanne Wirkkala and Timothy Bergreen. Schiff’s staff director, Michael Bahar, and his communications director, Patrick Boland, allegedly “orchestrated” the smear campaign.? |
