by WorldTribune Staff, June 16, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
The Swamp is all about self-preservation, and its multi-layered structure of operatives work night and day to ensure the main players are never held accountable for the original plot to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, an analysis said.
In July 2025, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley declassified the previously hidden appendix to Special Counsel John Durham’s 2023 report on the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
Book deals and cushy network gigs have come for the main Russiagate players. Accountability? Nope.
The Durham annex, discovered in a burn bag at the FBI by Director Kash Patel and declassified at Grassley’s request by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, revealed what he described as evidence of deliberate coordination between Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, the Obama White House, and U.S. intelligence agencies to fabricate the Trump-Russia narrative.
“The absence of consequences to date should disturb every American regardless of their politics. What was done was not a partisan crime but a constitutional one. The failure to answer it is a wound this Republic is still bleeding from,” retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn noted in a June 14 Substack analysis.
According to the Durham annex, the Clinton campaign approved a strategy to falsely link Trump to Russian interference in the 2016 election. Durham’s team said the plot received assistance from federal intelligence entities and foreign actors.
The CIA referenced Clinton’s alleged plan to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” Then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Those briefings included memos indicating Hillary Clinton had personally approved a plan to tie Trump to Russian election interference.
Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, opened on July 31, 2016.
“That is four days after this intelligence crossed the desks of the most senior law enforcement and national security officials in the United States government,” Flynn noted. “They opened the investigation anyway. Based on the Durham annex, the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain. These intelligence reports and related records were buried for years.”
The evidence is public and plentiful. The question is, what, if anything, happens to the people who were in on it?
“The system is not designed to hold itself accountable,” Flynn wrote.
Flynn knows the system. He note he spent 33 years in uniform and was appointed to senior positions by presidents of both political parties. He was appointed twice by Obama.
“I was someone who had spent my career demanding accountability from the intelligence community and that made me a target long before Trump ever put my name forward as the 24th National Security Advisor,” Flynn wrote.
The system, Flynn wrote, is “designed to absorb, delay, and diffuse accountability until the political will to impose it collapses. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an observable institutional pattern that has repeated itself across administrations of both parties for generations. Investigations produce reports. Reports produce headlines. Headlines produce congressional hearings, congressional hearings produce more reports, and the officials at the center of it all retain their security clearances, their speaking fees, their television contracts, and their book deals while the process grinds forward at the pace of geological change.”
The individuals “who ran Russiagate genuinely believed, and many of them still believe, that they were protecting the country,” Flynn continued. “James Comey has written extensively about his moral framework. John Brennan spoke with visible conviction on television for years about ‘threats to democracy.’ They have constructed an internal architecture in which their crimes were duties. That psychology does not break easily, and it does not break at all in the absence of real legal consequences.”
Flynn also pointed to the structure of “diffused guilt.”
In the Russiagate operation to frame Trump, no individual “had to own the entirety of the crime,” Flynn wrote. “Comey deferred to the broader intelligence assessment. Brennan pointed to the FISA court approvals. The FISA court approvals were based on a fabricated dossier. The fabricated dossier was paid for by the Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign was never prosecuted for it. Every link in the chain had a justification that pointed to another link, and the design of that chain was to ensure that accountability, if it came at all, would have nowhere clean to land.”
Legacy media is also a key player.
“The broadcast news networks devoted more than 2,284 minutes to Russiagate coverage during Trump’s first presidency,” Flynn noted. “Wall-to-wall, hour after hour, they treated every anonymous leak as established truth and every denial as suspicious deflection. Now that the underlying fraud has been confirmed in declassified government documents, those same networks have gone largely silent. Their silence is institutional protection for the people they spent years helping.”
Two years into President Trump’s second term, and the top Russiagate instigators have yet to be held accountable.
“I have watched this country’s governing class absorb scandal after scandal without real consequence for the people at the top,” Flynn noted.
“I am not saying accountability cannot come. I am saying that history gives us very little reason to assume it will come automatically and that the people who believe it will come simply because the evidence is overwhelming have not paid close enough attention to how Washington, D.C. operates.”
