Posted originally on CTH on December 22, 2025 | Sundance 

One of the many things I have learned, in my research and discussions about corruption in government, is that willfully blind defenders of DC corruption all seek the same way to avoid touching it.

The best way to coverup corrupt DC activity is to bury the damaging evidence under a pile of crazy that no one will touch.  That strategy works well. I’ll explain why with examples.

There is a rather large network of people, podcasters and financially dependent pundits pushing a false expectation around “Russiagate,” the collaborative Clinton/FBI operation to smear Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and then subsequently use the false Trump-Russia claims to continue targeting his administration.

CTH has outlined a very distinct difference between “Russiagate” and “Spygate.” {GO DEEP}  We remind all readers there will likely never be any indictments for the Russigate operation. To understand why, it’s best to think about the Trump targeting operation in stages:

Spygate 2012 to April 2016
♦ Russiagate Apr 2016 to May 2017 ♦
Mueller/Weissmann May 2017 to April 2019
Nadler/Schiff Impeachment Aug 2019
COVID Mail-Ballots 2020
Durham Oct 2020 – 2022
Jack Smith 2022 – 2024

Spygate is intentionally never discussed (I’ll come back to it).  However, the Russiagate phase is the part that people are most familiar with.  Unfortunately, discussing the evidence behind Russiagate became a lucrative business, and there are now people dependent on retaining Russiagate headlines based on nonsense.

There will never be a criminal indictment for anything to do with the “Russiagate” phase of the Trump targeting operation. The ‘why’ is simple:

Special Counsel John Durham brought cases against the Russiagate crew, specifically Clinton Campaign lawyer Michael Sussman. The predicate of the DOJ case was that the FBI was duped, tricked and misled by the Clinton campaign. Put another way, according to the DOJ – the FBI were victims of the Clinton conspiracy.

Now, despite all of us knowing this is untrue, Durham used this “FBI was tricked” predicate in court.  That underlying claim subsequently blocks legal accountability for any DOJ/FBI agent who was a conspirator in the operation.

The first defense Lawfare fabricators would deploy, would be to point out any new criminal prosecution would be reversing the original DOJ predicate to target their clients.  To prosecute for Russiagate, the DOJ claimed in court the DOJ & FBI were duped. The same DOJ cannot then reverse the case motive and say the DOJ & FBI were participants.

The unfortunate (I say intended) outcome is that all of the FBI/DOJ actors in Russiagate were given a pass by Special Counsel John Durham.

Instead, the accountability in the Russiagate fraud is public and political humiliation.

The criminal aspect is a dead end.

For five years I have repeated this assertion based on the reality of what took place with former AG Bill Barr, and former Special Counsel John Durham.  I hate it. I hated it then, and I hate it now; but it is what it is.

There was/is a lot of government corruption, wrongdoing and illegal activity in the continuum of targeting Donald Trump. Spygate, Russiagate, the Mueller special counsel, the impeachment effort all the way to Jack Smith and Arctic Frost, are fraught with people and agencies weaponizing their duties and offices.

The issue I am addressing NOW pertains exclusively to the Russiagate phase of that Trump targeting operation.

♦ As this reality sets in, and as the Russiagate story begins to fade, the Russiagate limited hangout begins to lose followers.  However, those who have a self-identity and financial dependency based on the Russiagate story, begin to make outlandish claims in order to retain relevance and keep the audience interested.

This is the current status, and it has created a problem.

There is a big downside to the nonsense now being promoted by the Russiagate crowd.  As I said in the intro, the easiest way to bury the truth is to cover it in a blanket of crazy, so that no one will go near it.  That is also the current status.

When you see those with Russiagate identities (dependents) complaining about the FBI, DOJ and even DNI are ignoring them, it’s because the remaining Russiagate dependents are pushing nonsense now.  They are creating a crazy blanket that is spreading over all of the Trump targeting investigations.

Patrick Byrne, General Michael Flynn, Svetlana Lokhova, and any alternative media who promote them, including Lara Logan and Emerald Robinson, are now creating a problem.  Either by intent or by mistake, they are creating a scenario where people with the power to do something about the other Trump targeting operations are becoming less willing to review the evidence.

Let me give you a specific example using Patrick Byrne, a colleague of Flynn and frequent guest on alternative platforms.

Below left you see Maria Butina, pictured when she was involved in the 2016 Russiagate story.  Below right, you see Maria Butina three days ago; she is a current member of the Russian equivalent of the House of Representatives (the Russian Duma).

After being quietly freed from prison in the U.S, there is no way Maria Butina would be a member of the Russian Duma unless she was allowed by the govt of Russia to be in that position.

That point accepted. The original issue was always a question of whether Maria Butina was an agent of the Russian govt, ie. “a spy”, or whether she was just a random Russian gun enthusiast.

Butina’s position in the Duma confirms that yes, in actuality she was almost certainly an agent of the Russian govt. in 2016, which was technically the position of the CIA/FBI.  Her appearance in the USA was then turned into an operation to use her travel as a surveillance vehicle for the corrupt intents and purposes of the FBI counterintelligence operation, Crossfire Hurricane.

That operation led to the enlistment of Patrick Byrne, who is recently a self-admitted CIA source/asset, who used Butina as a surveillance virus to infect various GOP political candidates in the 2016 election.

Byrne willingly participated in the operation, befriended Butina, began a romantic relationship with Butina and ran her into various GOP and Trump officials. All of that was always sketchy.

In 2016, Butina was an asset of the Russian govt., used by the U.S. govt. and intelligence agencies as part of their operation to conduct surveillance of American political candidates. This part is known by many.

However, approximately a month ago, just before Patrick Byrne announced his long-term relationship with the CIA on the Emerald Robinson podcast, Byrne was inside Russia promoting a video docuseries of his activity (picture right).

During the promotional events, Byrne told the Russian media and Russian audience he was a covert CIA asset.  This was all part of his media promo for his movie.

There is no way the Russian government would randomly accept a CIA operative into their country, unless the Russian government planned to use the spectacle of the storyline to advance their propaganda interests to their domestic audience. Essentially, Byrne telling Russians how terrible the CIA is. This would be an acceptable thing for the Russian government to promote.

All of that is shared to give context to the Byrne group (Byrne, Flynn, Lokhova and more) claiming the larger U.S. intelligence system, under DNI Tulsi Gabbard, was ignoring their continued contacts with information about government corruption.

Of course, DNI Tulsi Gabbard and all reasonable people would politely ignore contacts from, or isolate information from, this sketchy network of unofficial/official intelligence associations, claiming to be covert CIA operatives and telling the Russians about their involvement therein.

Good grief.  Can you imagine if Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard participated in anything, anything with a strange guy who was willfully creating Russian propaganda against the USA for consumption in Russia?

The sketchy Patrick Byrne guy is inside Russia telling media he is a CIA asset, and then he comes back to the USA and tells American podcast audiences that he is having a hard time getting the Trump administration to accept his team’s information or assistance.

Again, the easiest way to bury genuinely damaging information is to cover it with sketchy nonsense that no one will touch – including Byrne and Flynn’s vast Venezuelan global voting control conspiracy and all other Q-feeding gibberish.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Can you imagine the firehose of whackadoodle stuff that is being transmitted to the DNI by so-called friends of the Trump administration?  Then consider the problem they create trying to figure out the crazy from the relevant.

Let me say for the record, this problem is not being accidentally created.