Forthcoming revelations from former Special Counsel John Durham’s report will expose the Russiagate controversy, showing just what Hillary Clinton and the FBI did to leverage a Russia collusion narrative against President Donald Trump, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said on Sunday.
During an interview on Fox News, Ratcliffe told “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo that he has been working to secure the release of a classified section from Durham’s report from 2023 that heavily criticized the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged links between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Today, exclusively on @SundayFutures with @MariaBartiromo, CIA Director John Ratcliffe @CIADirector spoke about the origins of the Russia Collusion narrative.@FoxNews pic.twitter.com/YYyWQnlwGO
— SundayMorningFutures (@SundayFutures) July 27, 2025
“What hasn’t come out yet and what’s going to come out is the underlying intelligence that I have spent the last few months making recommendations about final declassification and sent that to the Department of Justice,” Ratcliffe said. “That will come out in the John Durham report classified annex. And what that intelligence shows, Maria, is that part of this was a Hillary Clinton plan, but part of it was an FBI plan to be an accelerant to that fake Steele dossier, to those fake Russia collusion claims by pouring oil on the fire, by amplifying the lie and burying the truth of what Hillary Clinton was up to.”
In 2020, when he served as director of national intelligence, Ratcliffe unveiled documents that showed federal officials referred Clinton to the FBI for investigation after obtaining “insight” into a Russian intelligence analysis that alleged she approved a campaign plan to link Trump to Russia’s hacking operations in order to distract from the controversy over he unauthorized use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state.
Durham testified to Congress that members of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team were not made aware of the intelligence and his report indicated the “Clinton Plan intelligence” could have been helpful to them. The report pointed to British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s now-discredited anti-Trump dossier, stemming from research funded by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, that the FBI was found to have improperly used to secure FISA surveillance warrants against onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. It also referenced the unfounded secret backchannel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank that was promoted by Clinton and her team in the run-up to the 2016 election.
“Whether or not the Clinton Plan intelligence was based on reliable or unreliable information, or was ultimately true or false, it should have prompted FBI personnel to immediately undertake an analysis of the information and to act with far greater care and caution when receiving, analyzing, and relying upon materials of partisan origins, such as the Steele Reports and the Alfa Bank allegations,” Durham’s report said. “The FBI also should have disseminated the Clinton Plan intelligence more widely among those responsible for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation so that they could effectively incorporate it into their analysis and decision-making, and their representations to the OI attorneys and, ultimately, the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court].”
The report said there was a classified appendix that provides further information about “details of the Clinton Plan intelligence,” “facts that heightened the potential relevance of this intelligence” to the Office of Special Counsel’s inquiry, and “the Office’s efforts to verify or refute the key claims found in this intelligence.”
Ratcliffe told Bartiromo “much of” the testimony that Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, and former CIA Director John Brennan provided to Durham or Congress in the past five years “is, frankly, completely inconsistent with what our underlying intelligence that is about to be declassified in the Durham annex, what that reflects.” Acknowledging how Attorney General Pam Bondi has a new “strike force” tasked with evaluating the evidence relating the Obama administration’s efforts to drive the Russia collusion allegations, he added, “It is a different Department of Justice, a different FBI, and an opportunity to look at how these people really did conspire to run a hoax, a fraud on the American people and against Donald Trump’s presidency.”
