Why has a highly classified, and yet so far meritless investigation, made such a prominent appearance in the media? A recent inside expose of the Clinton campaign, ‘Shattered,’ gives an insight. In damage control after the loss, ‘Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.’ Their ‘hacking’ argument was not just that Russia’s actions influenced the election, but that Trump colluded with Russia to do so. This was a relatively new narrative not yet introduced into public lexicon. Google Trends shows almost no interest in the search topics of ‘Trump collusion’ and ‘Trump Russia collusion’ until after the election.

It is broadly agreed to by the intelligence community that Russia was behind the hacks and the FBI is still in the process of investigating the matter. However, the investigation includes an additional line of inquiry, ‘Was Russia orchestrating its actions with the Trump campaign?’ No evidence has ever shown as much, so where did the idea of Russian collusion originate from? All signs point to Clinton loyalist and former CIA chief John Brennan. The Guardian reports that British intelligence was suspicious about contacts between ancillary members of Trump’s campaign and suspected Russian agents, prompting ‘GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, [to pass] material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan.’ There is nothing remarkable about sharing intelligence, what’s remarkable is what happened next. With loose suspicions, ‘Brennan used GCHQ information and intelligence from other partners to launch a major inter-agency investigation’ into the presidential candidate that he was actively opposing. This investigation went so far as to order classified wiretaps on at least one member of Trump’s campaign. It also looks like it included foreign agencies in the effort, which explains why the early FISA reports all came from the British press.

Most disturbing, intelligence reports generated from this investigation were monitored by the White House itself. The White House was closely monitoring an on-going investigation into the opposing party’s presidential candidate. Not only that, but these intelligence reports were largely not generated by a warranted search of the subjects, rather, they were created by targeting communications of foreign nationals who would interact with Trump associates. Further, there is no indication that there was ever anything wrong about these communications. In other words, the White House was monitoring completely legal and normal communications of the Trump campaign under the pretense of national security. However, Brennan did not just loop the White House in. According to the New York Times, ‘John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was so concerned about the Russian threat that he gave an unusual private briefing in the late summer to Harry Reid, then the Senate Democratic leader.’ Shortly after the meeting, Harry Reid tried to make the investigation public, but his reputation was so tarnished for his past lying that no one believed him. So not only did Brennan launch a major investigation into the administration's political opponent and regularly report the findings to the White House, he then tried to inject the investigation’s existence into the public realm. These aren’t the actions of a man spurred on by ‘suspicious interactions,’ but by someone with an agenda and it is quite clear what that was, he wanted to be Clinton’s CIA director. In fact, he went to the extraordinary length of publicly opposing one of Trump’s stump speeches. He wanted Clinton to win and he did his best to make it happen.