The Death of the Deep State: Crossfire Hurricane Release Part II
How FBI gatekeepers James Baker and Bill Priestap green-lit an unprecedented presidential probe long after their own files showed the evidence was empty.
The FBI’s Phantom Predicate
INVESTIGATIONS: Saturday, April 26th, 2025: By Walter Curt
In a newly declassified FBI document dated May 16, 2017, the bureau claimed to have an “articulable factual basis” to suspect that President Donald Trump was acting as an agent of Russia. This Electronic Communication (EC) – approved by FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap and General Counsel James Baker – opened an unprecedented counterintelligence investigation into Trump just one week after he fired FBI Director James Comey. Tellingly, however, the actual paragraph laying out the FBI’s “factual basis” is fully redacted in the released memo. The gap between the FBI’s explosive theory and the evidence it was willing to reveal has raised a central question first posed by journalist Aaron Maté: did the FBI really have solid evidence to justify targeting a sitting U.S. president as a possible foreign agent, or was the “factual basis” nonexistent?
We now know it was a mirage. Newly released files and testimony reveal that the FBI’s private assessment of the Trump-Russia narrative never matched the sensational public storyline built on the Steele dossier. While major media outlets breathlessly touted tales of Michael Cohen’s phantom Prague rendezvous and Carter Page’s imagined Rosneft payoff, the Bureau’s own documents show those allegations were uncorroborated, contradicted by passport records, or even flagged as likely Russian disinformation. From the vague tip that launched Crossfire Hurricane in July 2016, through two years of surveillance, informants, and special-counsel scrutiny, agents found no evidence of campaign coordination with Moscow. Internally, memos by Peter Strzok and others admitted as much; externally, selective leaks kept the collusion drama alive. The result was a Mueller investigation that concluded in 2019 with no proof of conspiracy—an extraordinary exercise built on a foundation the FBI itself knew was shaky at best.
An Investigation Built on Sand
On May 16, 2017—just days after Comey’s firing—Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe opened an unprecedented counter-intelligence case to determine whether President Trump was a Russian agent, with Bill Priestap and James Baker’s sign-off and a FARA “Sensitive Investigative Matter” label. The single paragraph that supposedly justified this move remains fully redacted, and even former FBI officials call the step “highly unusual.”
By that date, the Bureau’s own files had already torpedoed its chief evidence: Steele’s primary source disowned the dossier as bar-talk gossip; two classified reports flagged the Cohen-in-Prague tale as likely Russian disinformation; surveillance found no Rosneft-for-sanctions deal, and undercover recordings showed no campaign-hack coordination. Internally the dossier’s corroboration was “zero,” yet the FBI kept citing it for FISA renewals and even re-engaged Steele days before targeting the president.
The takeaway is stark: the FBI launched a probe of a sitting commander-in-chief after its key leads had collapsed and its “factual basis” was already missing in action. For the step-by-step timeline—and how each headline claim was debunked with the new documents—see the first installment, “The Death of the Deep State: Crossfire Hurricane Documents Released.”
The Gatekeepers Who Pulled the Trigger
The evidence-free “Russian-agent” probe did not materialize out of thin air; two senior officials made the call after the case’s foundation had already collapsed. James “Jim” Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, and Bill Priestap, the Bureau’s counter-intelligence chief, signed the May 16, 2017 EC that treated a sitting president as a potential Kremlin asset—even though both men had just seen the dossier disavowed by its own source and flagged as likely disinformation.
Baker served as the Bureau’s legal gatekeeper, personally channeling Clinton-funded Alfa-Bank data from Michael Sussmann and portions of the Steele memos from reporter David Corn into Crossfire Hurricane. Priestap, running counter-intel, relied on those same unverified materials to keep FISA surveillance alive and to bless McCabe’s request for the Trump investigation.
What follows is a closer look at how Baker and Priestap—armed with warnings, contradictions, and exculpatory evidence—still green-lit the most explosive FBI inquiry in modern history.
Baker’s Role: Green-Lighting an Investigation He Knew Lacked Predicate
James Baker, as the FBI’s General Counsel in 2017, was a key figure in this saga. Not only did Baker sign off on the opening of the Trump investigation, he was deeply involved in the FBI’s handling of the very materials that proved baseless. By his own account, Baker took an unusual hands-on role in 2016 when he personally met with outside operatives peddling Trump-Russia allegations. In September 2016, Baker’s friend Michael Sussmann – a lawyer for the Clinton campaign – approached him with data purportedly showing a secret server link between Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Baker dutifully transmitted this Clinton-funded concoction to FBI investigators, effectively laundered into the probe. That allegation, like so many others, was false; the FBI quickly dismissed the Alfa Bank tale as unfounded, though Baker’s involvement later became a focus in Special Counsel John Durham’s inquiry.
Around the same time, Baker was also in contact with reporter David Corn of Mother Jones, another friend who had a copy of the Steele dossier. Corn gave parts of Steele’s memos to Baker in late October 2016, and Baker in turn handed them to agent Bill Priestap in the counterintelligence division. In essence, Baker served as a conduit for both streams of the Clinton campaign’s opposition research – the Alfa Bank story via Sussmann and the Steele dossier via Corn. He was perhaps uniquely positioned to know exactly how dubious these materials were.
By January 2017, Baker was aware (or should have been) that the case for “Trump-Russia collusion” was crumbling. As the FBI’s top lawyer, he reviewed at least the initial FISA warrant application on Carter Page, later testifying that he wanted to ensure it would “stand up over time.” Yet we now know that application was rife with errors and omissions – something an Inspector General investigation found in late 2019. Baker was also privy to high-level intelligence and internal assessments about the investigation’s progress. He would have known, for instance, that the FBI had failed to verify Steele’s claims by the time of the first FISA renewal and that Steele’s own source had severely undercut his reporting. And Baker certainly knew of the concerns about political bias within the Crossfire Hurricane team – he later said he was “quite alarmed” upon learning of the anti-Trump text messages between lead agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, worrying that investigative decisions “were driven by political bias of any sort.” Those texts, in which Strzok spoke of an “insurance policy” in case Trump won, have since fueled suspicions that partisan animus played a role in the probe.
Despite all these red flags, James Baker threw his weight behind McCabe’s push to investigate President Trump. The newly released EC from May 2017 lists Baker as one of the approving officials. In effect, the FBI’s general counsel – armed with knowledge that the major allegations of Trump-Russia collusion were unverified or disproven – agreed to treat the President of the United States as a potential clandestine agent of a hostile power. Why? Baker has never fully explained his reasoning in public. But his closed-door testimony and other comments provide clues that the decision was driven more by fear and conjecture than by facts.
When Baker testified to Congress in October 2018, he conceded that the notion of investigating a sitting president in this manner was extraordinary and troubling. He described the situation as “concerned” and acknowledged it was a step without precedent in FBI history – “novel” and “highly unusual,” in his words. This was no routine inquiry; it was understood inside the Bureau as a momentous and fraught move. Baker’s testimony also pulled back the curtain on the atmosphere among FBI leadership after Comey’s firing. He revealed that in a critical meeting in May 2017, Andrew McCabe and FBI lawyer Lisa Page relayed to him that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had suggested wearing a wire to secretly record President Trump. Far from dismissing it as a joke (as Rosenstein later claimed), FBI officials took the suggestion seriously. Baker said this was “not a joking sort of time. This was pretty dark.”
He further testified about discussions of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office – telling lawmakers he was informed that at least two Cabinet members were “ready to go down this road.” These startling admissions show just how deep the sense of alarm (or perhaps vendetta) ran within the FBI and DOJ at the time. The leadership was so panicked by Trump’s moves – chiefly the firing of Comey – that they contemplated surreptitiously recording the President and even trying to unseat him via the Constitution.
This state of affairs suggests that the FBI’s decision to open the case on Trump was driven by subjective anxiety and worst-case scenario thinking, rather than any concrete new evidence of Russian control. McCabe himself has effectively confirmed this. In a 2019 interview recounting his decision, McCabe said he launched the counterintelligence probe because if Trump fired Comey to obstruct the Russia investigation, “you have to ask yourself, ‘Why would a president of the United States do that?’” He continued: “So all those same sorts of facts cause us to wonder, is there an inappropriate relationship, a connection between this president and our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia?”.
In other words, McCabe had no evidence of a Trump-Russia “connection” – he could only “wonder” if one existed. The mere fact of Trump’s unsettling behavior (in their view) – firing the FBI director and allegedly asking him to ease off an investigation of Michael Flynn – was transmuted into a suspicion of espionage. As Baker’s account underscores, FBI brass went down a dark hypothetical path in May 2017, treating Trump’s every move as potential proof of a conspiracy, even when actual investigative threads kept turning up empty.
No “Factual Basis,” No Accountability
Viewed in hindsight, the FBI’s second Trump-Russia investigation appears to have been built on a mirage. The “articulable factual basis” cited in the opening EC has never been revealed – and likely for good reason: it would show there was essentially nothing there. Everything the Bureau knew at the time pointed away from Trump being some kind of Manchurian Candidate. Crossfire Hurricane had not unearthed a smoking gun; it had generated a pile of discredited allegations and exculpatory information. Yet the FBI plunged ahead to officially treat the President as a national security threat. The resulting investigation was quickly folded into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s larger Russia probe (Mueller was appointed on May 17, 2017, just one day after McCabe opened the case).
Tellingly, when Mueller delivered his final report two years later, he made no mention whatsoever of the FBI’s Trump-as-Russian-agent inquiry. He was silent on the very question that McCabe’s team had considered paramount – likely because Mueller found it so baseless it wasn’t even worth addressing. Unbeknownst to the public, the FBI quietly closed down the Trump counterintelligence case in March 2019, soon after Mueller’s investigation wrapped up. The closing EC (also declassified in redacted form) noted that the probe had been transferred to Mueller’s team and utilized “a variety of investigative techniques,” but it offered no indication that any incriminating evidence was ever found. The case was simply terminated, its rationale never fully explained or justified to the American people.
To this day, the FBI has refused to unredact the “factual basis” for its May 2017 presidential investigation. The six-page opening memo remains mostly blacked out. Congress and inspectors general have tiptoed around this sensitive topic. The Justice Department’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz, in his December 2019 review of Crossfire Hurricane, deliberately “ignored McCabe’s decision to investigate Trump as an agent of Russia”. Special Counsel John Durham, who in 2019-2023 examined the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe, stated that the question of the May 2017 investigation was outside his scope (since his mandate focused on the 2016 election period).
In short, no official review has squarely grappled with what may be the most egregious aspect of the entire Russiagate affair: that FBI leadership opened a case against the president of the United States without factual predicate. The result is a glaring accountability gap. The principal actors – James Baker, Andrew McCabe, Bill Priestap, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and others – have so far escaped any legal or professional consequences for their roles in this fiasco. McCabe was fired in 2018 for an unrelated ethics violation (lying about a media leak) but faced no prosecution and has since re-emerged as a paid network pundit. Baker resigned from the FBI in 2018 (amid a leak investigation that never resulted in charges) and went on to high-profile roles in Big Tech. Priestap quietly retired. Strzok and Page were ousted over their misconduct but also were not prosecuted. Meanwhile, the FBI and DOJ have offered the public no real reckoning for an investigation that, in retrospect, appears to have been an obviously politically motivated investigation into a duly elected president in an attempt to oust him.
What we have now, thanks to declassified files and dogged investigative reporting, is a far clearer picture of what didn’t happen. There was no collusion. There was no secret plot between Trump and Moscow. And inside the FBI, they knew or should have known that long before they officially targeted Trump in May 2017. The “Russian agent” case was a product of paranoia, disinformation, and political bias – not solid evidence. If anything, the real conspiracy was the one to convince the American public that their elected president might be a Kremlin pawn, when in fact that theory had collapsed behind closed doors. This episode demands accountability. The available evidence now is more than sufficient to warrant a thorough inquiry – and yes, potential prosecution – of officials who deceived the courts or who opened investigations with “no factual basis” to back them up. Thus far, only a junior FBI lawyer has been held criminally responsible (for doctoring an email in the Page FISA renewal). The architects of the broader malfeasance have skated by. That must end if there is to be any restoration of trust in federal law enforcement.
After years of obfuscation, the truth is coming into focus: the FBI’s top brass gambled with the stability of the country, pursuing a president with allegations they knew were unverified, if not outright false. This was a grave abuse of power. Had it succeeded in crippling Trump’s presidency, it would have amounted to a silent coup on the basis of a lie. Even in failure, it inflicted untold damage on American political discourse and institutional credibility. Now, with the benefit of newly released documents and testimony, the onus is on the Justice Department to confront this wrongdoing.
The time has come for a full public reckoning – and, where appropriate, prosecutions – to ensure that those responsible for the FBI’s baseless Trump-Russia investigation are finally held to account. The lesson of Crossfire Hurricane and its sequel must be that no agency and no officials are above the law or beyond scrutiny, especially when they invoke national security to target an elected president without evidence. The American people deserve nothing less than the truth, the whole truth, and justice for any who betrayed their trust.
