The Russiagate Binder Is a Distraction from the Real Scandal

If you’ve ever seen the media report on a topic you know well, you’ve probably noticed they almost always get it wrong. That’s exactly how the past week felt to us with the release of the infamous Russiagate binder.

Probably the most illustrative moment came from a viral video clip of author and cartoonist Scott Adams, reacting in amazement to the binder’s purported revelation that Barack Obama had known all along the Trump-Russia collusion hoax was a Clinton campaign smear. The problem is, the revelation isn’t new at all. We’ve known definitively since September 2020 that Obama not only knew the Russia collusion narrative was a Clinton campaign smear but that he knew it before the FBI even launched its fraudulent Crossfire Hurricane investigation. In fact, the FBI launched its investigation under false pretenses just days after Obama learned it was a Clinton campaign hoax. The timing is hard to ignore.

Adams’ reaction underlines the bigger issue with the Russiagate binder specifically—and with these kinds of “transparency” events in general. While swarms of poorly informed “influencers” and media outlets rush to push these stories as breaking news, the real story gets buried. In this case, that is the fact that the binder contains no new revelations. It’s mostly a rehash of documents that were already public, sometimes now with fewer redactions, but in other cases—shockingly—with more redactions than before. The rush to declare victory, to proclaim “it’s all finally out,” serves the government’s interests perfectly: they get to keep hiding the real material.

In other words, the binder is a sleight of hand—just as we warned for four years. It doesn’t move the needle, it doesn’t bring us closer to understanding the origins or accountability behind the Russiagate operation.

Almost as big of a scandal as Obama knowing about the Clinton campaign hoax in real time is that the media sat on the story. When then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe released the evidence in October 2020, the story barely made a ripple. Had it been widely, and truthfully, reported then, it could very well have changed the outcome of the 2020 election—and that’s not even factoring in the broader fraud and irregularities from that cycle. But even that’s only part of the scandal.