Russiagate Even Creeps Into the Trump-Putin Summit — That’s How Bad This Story Is

Criminal offenses or not, there has to be accountability.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
President Trump and President Vladimir Putin shake hands at the end of a press conference at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on August 15, 2025 at Anchorage. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

We may never get to the bottom of all of the treacheries, betrayals, and lies of Russiagate, but it has to be an effort worth pursuing if this country is going to end the weaponization and lawfare used unfairly against President Trump.

Criminal offenses or not, there has to be accountability.

Yet the story won’t die.

Even now, at the moment that the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, and the FBI’s chief, Kash Patel, are declassifying documents underscoring the falsehoods — here were Mr. Trump and President Vladimir Putin standing near each other at a press conference at Anchorage, Alaska, just last Friday — and what comes up? Russiagate. Mr. Trump spoke of all the lies. Mr. Putin said nothing.

I doubt seriously if it’s going to be a key issue in the eventual peace plan that Mr. Trump is crafting. Yet historian Walter Russell Mead believes that Russiagate continues to interfere with the relationship between Messrs. Putin and Trump.

And Mr. Mead is not alone in this, because we do not yet know all there is to know about Russiagate.

That is why, for the sake of America’s integrity, the current investigations by the justice department, including likely grand juries, are something we must as a nation go through.

At this point, there’s no question that President Obama and the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, were the most important progenitors of the Russiagate fallacy.

After Mrs. Clinton lost, Mr. Obama moved for a new, politically manufactured Intelligence Community Assessment. 

Yet, during the campaign itself, it was the Clinton campaign and its political operation that financed the phony Steele dossier that became the font of all evil.

And the lies embodied in that phony dossier were carried far and wide by intelligence and law enforcement officials like a former FBI head, James Comey; a former director of central intelligence, John Brennan; a former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and their deputies.

They broke rules, snuffed out dissent, and leaked classified documents, all while the left-wing press carried their water — blindly and without question.

All of these people must be held to account.

And then there was the incredible invasion of Mar-a-Lago by the FBI under the aegis of Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was found by a federal district judge, Aileen Cannon, to be illegally appointed.

Invading a former president and his first lady in their home. How could this have happened in the United States of America — at the hands of the FBI?

Has the FBI actually investigated itself properly?

Have the participants of that invasion been purged from the agency? 

And, anyway, what were they doing there in the first place?

What exactly were they looking for?

I’m suggesting, from the standpoint of both domestic and foreign policy, these questions and the related issue of accountability, simply must be answered.

And the American people must have these answers, if we are to be truly a great nation.

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.


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