I was the fake news yesterday.

I taunted Kash Patel that he had yet to declassify the Crossfire Hurricane binder Trump purportedly declassified on January 19, 2021. But then I learned that Trump had declassified it.

Sort of.

Trump ordered it released in April, whereupon John Solomon posted it. And after Judicial Watch mentioned it in their FOIA lawsuit, FBI released a copy here. Which I’ve made available here.

I say sort of because, if you compare the released files with the two-part release to Judicial Watch as part of their 2022 FOIA (one, two), there are still a few of the things that were pending for DOJ release that have not been released. Plus, neither re-release includes two Carter Page FISA applications that have been substantially released.

That said, the famed Crossfire Hurricane binder is, as I wrote up in this post, one Dumbass Binder. It is really not all that interesting. It actually doesn’t tell the story of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, not even as completely as Jeffrey Jensen did in his efforts to unravel the Mike Flynn prosecution (but then, that effort involved a great deal of deception and cherry pick).

Almost half of the released pages consist of the Confidential Human Source management files of Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper. Those describe how much the men were paid and when they met with their handlers, including on topics totally unrelated to Crossfire Hurricane. That is, they’re very useful for Russian spies to reconstruct past disclosures. They’re very useful for making anyone who might inform on Trump or Russian sources think twice before cooperating with the FBI.

They’re useless for telling us what really happened with the investigation.

The release of the binder is yet another item in a very long list, seemingly done as part of Trump’s grievance that he needed Russian help to get elected, that has instead served to damage US intelligence, particularly Russian experts, a process I argued was built into Russia’s 2016 operation from the start:

Entail complicity in destroying the Deep State: I’m largely alone in this, but I believe that at least one of those quid pro quos raised the stakes of the inducements. If it is true — as I laid out here — that the Shadow Brokers operation dumping NSA exploits used the same infrastructure as the Guccifer 2.0 operation, it would mean the acceptance of the latter involved tacit participation in the former. More concretely, by the time Roger Stone started pursuing a Julian Assange pardon in October 2016, WikiLeaks was already sitting on the CIA hacking tools stolen by Joshua Schulte, tools that Schulte himself recognized would make it easy for Russia to identify CIA’s operations and assets; by the time Stone started intervening at the “highest levels of Government” for Assange, Trump’s own CIA Director had dubbed WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service. In other words, well before he was elected, Trump unwittingly entered a deal that would make him a participant in the willful destruction of the US security establishment to deliver on his side of the bargain.

Trump’s invented grievance about the 2016 election has led him to do the following:

• Fire many of FBI’s top Russian experts at the FBI.
• Retaliate against experts.
• Expose recent CIA recruits.
• Appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe as top spies, all of them Useful Idioms for Russia.
• Fire more of FBI’s top Russian experts at FBI.
• Elimination or down-grading of programs used to reign in Russia, including FARA, FCPA, Foreign Influence Task Force, and KleptoCapture.
• Assign an incompetent idiot, Steve Witkoff, to carry out negotiations with Russia.
• Refocus of organizations fighting hacking and foreign election interference.
• Fire two top officials on the National Intelligence Council.
• Fire six professionals at National Security Counsel, followed by Alex Wong and eventually Mike Waltz — a number of whom were more hawkish on Russia.
• Reassignment of many experts on the National Security Counsel.
• Fire NSA Director Timothy Haugh and NSA General Counsel April Doss.

And more recent disclosures — notably the HPSCI Report that served as a time machine to make Trump’s contacts with Russia go away — will make it far less likely that allies (like the Dutch) will share intelligence.

You could attribute all this to Trump’s grievances about the Deep State. At some point, though, that excuse begins to ring hollow.

But the effect of it is that Trump will walk into a meeting with Vladimir Putin today having rid himself of almost any competent advisors on Russia. He has, since he started clinging to the grievance Russia built into their 2016 election operation, aggressively eliminated all the people he would need to negotiate with Russia competently.

When Trump met with Putin in 2018, he was still advised by Fiona Hill, a genuine expert.

Hill was asked about her experiences at the summit in Helsinki, when Trump caused huge controversy by meeting Putin alone then appearing deferential in public, saying he took the Russian president at his word that he did not interfere in the US election in 2016 – a conclusion not supported by US intelligence and law enforcement.

Hill has previously said she was so appalled that she considered faking a sudden illness to stop the press conference.

“I also thought about pulling the fire alarm, but I didn’t know what Finnish was for ‘fire alarm’,” Hill said, to laughter.

More seriously, Hill said, the Putin press conference “was one of the most humiliating episodes of all time.

[snip]

“The issue was really the press conference itself. We knew that it was going to be difficult. I’d actually recommended against a press conference. My word didn’t have much coinage in that environment but one of the reasons was because Trump admires Putin so much, he never wants to be humiliated. And it was all about a personal sense of humiliation.

“The instance in which he was asked the question about whether he felt that the Russians interfered in the election, he wanted to push back very quickly against it. He wanted to diminish any kind of idea of that because if … he wanted to get the message across that nobody had interfered on his behalf.”

He got his ass handed to him. It was an utter humiliation for Trump and for the United States.

But this time, having soiled himself in Helsinki, Trump will go into a solo meeting with Putin having been advised by sycophants at best, including those who proudly spout Russian Useful Idioms.