CIA Under Fire for Allegedly Targeting Trump Allies

(UnitedHeadlines.com) – A new report from independent journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag allegedly shows that before the 2016 election, the United States Intelligence Community, including the CIA, targeted former president Donald Trump, 77, and 26 of his associates, triggering the allegations that the Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia.

The report published Feb. 12 on Shellenberger’s public Substack, which cited multiple unnamed sources, stated that former CIA Director John Brennan presented Trump and his 26 associates to the intelligence-gathering organizations in Australia, Canada, the U.S., the United Kingdom and New Zealand, that are collectively known as the “Five Eyes” agencies.

According to one source, associates of Trump were identified by the United States Intelligence Community as people to “make contact with or manipulate” in order to develop a relationship with the person that could lead to intelligence.

As early as March 2016, the report states that Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intelligence apparatus made contact with the associates. However, a spokesperson for GCHQ calls the claims made in the report “nonsense.”

The report by the independent journalists stated the intelligence gathered during the alleged surveillance effort is kept in a “10-inch binder,” which may contain evidence that “laws against spying and election interference” were broken by “multiple US intelligence officials.” At the end of Trump’s presidency, he ordered the information in the binder to be declassified. However, the whereabouts of the alleged binder are unknown.

The report by the three journalists comes after the four-year review of the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia by Special Counsel John Durham. Durham concluded in March 2023 that the investigation was “seriously flawed,” adding that there was no evidence to warrant an FBI investigation. In response to Durham’s report, the FBI said “dozens of corrective actions” have been made that would have prevented “the missteps identified in the report” if they had been in place in 2016.