Ex-FBI intel chief: Clinton campaign used 'contrived disinformation' to deceive voters in 2016

As the Biden administration pushes its new Disinformation Governance Board, the FBI's former intelligence chief says he is now convinced Democrat Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign used "contrived disinformation" to try to mislead Americans into believing Donald Trump was a Russian asset.

"This is more than just political dirty tricks," retired Assistant Director for Intelligence Kevin Brock told the "Just the News, Not Noise" television show Wednesday. "Political dirty tricks usually have some foundation in truth. But they just made stuff up."

Brock, one of the bureau's most respected former executives, said he has been impressed with the way Special Counsel John Durham has used the prosecution of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann to expose how the false Russia collusion narrative was constructed.

Sussmann, who has pleaded innocent and faces trial at the end of the month, is charged with lying to the FBI in fall 2016 when he denied he was acting on behalf of a client in bringing the bureau what turned out to be false allegations that Trump had a secret communications channel with the Kremlin.

Durham has exposed recent evidence showing the Clinton campaign's own researchers were skeptical of the allegation, which one described as a "red herring." The underlying data permitted no more than an "inference" at best, according to another. Last week, prosecutors unveiled an email showing a journalist had told the campaign research team weeks before it approached the FBI that one of the Trump-Russia allegations was "bullshit."

"This is the way disinformation is really exposed, not by some contrived government agency, but by evidence presented in court that gets at the truth of what happened," Brock said of the prosecutor's recent evidentiary filings in court. "What Durham is methodically doing, is laying out a case that the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democrat Party used contrived disinformation in a conspiracy, in a conspiratorial way, to deceive the American voter ahead of the election."

Brock has been sharply critical of his former agency for allowing the Russia collusion probe to continue for two years without an adequate predicate or strong evidence.

He said Sussmann's approach to the FBI must be looked at in a larger context that the Clinton campaign and Democrat Party flooded the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and news media from multiple angles trying to sell the Russia collusion story with flawed evidence like the Steele dossier and get an investigation started.

"This is much more  than an attorney for the Clinton campaign lying to the FBI," said Brock. "He is using this charge to expose a larger story, a larger narrative."

Durham "called it a joint venture of conspiratorial actions that contrived information," Brock explained, referring to Durham's recent court filings. "... Certainly the American people were defrauded."

Brock also expressed concern about the Homeland Security Department's newly created Disinformation Governance Board, saying it would be a mistake for the agency to use it to referee Americans' speech and that it is ripe for political abuse.

"I think that disinformation is in the eye of the beholder," he said. "I think most people suspect that all of this information will be information promulgated by one political party rather than the other. And so the danger of a governance board like this is that it will be be beholden to the party that's in power in government at that time to silence or mute opposition viewpoints.

"Now, DHS, the secretary has gone to great lengths to say 'No, we're  just interested in countering Russian disinformation or Chinese disinformation on social media platforms," he added. "But it's something that should be treated, and I think we are looking at it as something to be wary of."