The government is continuing to deceive and obscure the truth about the alleged Russiagate plot against Donald Trump. This was evident in the recent release of a heavily redacted document, years overdue, regarding the origins of the FBI investigation.

This comes to light thanks only to the dogged efforts of the folks at RealClearInvestigations.

One of the key pieces of information that the Bureau is still concealing is the “articulable factual basis” that served as the foundation for launching the 2017 investigation into Trump’s suspected collaboration with Russian intelligence.

Yes, it’s been obvious for years that there was no factual basis for the probe. 

But to see why that’s precisely the issue, and why the Bureau needs to fully come clean, take a look at the whole sordid history . . . .

During the 2016 election, the Hillary Clinton campaign, aiming to divert attention from her unlawful use of a private email server to share classified information, hired former spy Christopher Steele to fabricate false claims that her presidential adversary, Donald Trump, was involved with Russia.

He in turn pays an “assistant” to imagine some dirt; those lies — collated into the now infamous Steele Dossier — are used to justify a probe into Trump’s campaign. 

Clinton escapes any legal pain for her email violations after FBI Director James Comey recommends against prosecution; Trump wins the 2016 race under a cloud of baseless suspicion, which a left-leaning media establishment adds to and amplifies. 

In November 2016, the FBI gives Steele the boot as a source; in January 2017, Steele’s lead fabricator Igor Danchenko tells the FBI that there was “zero” corroboration for the dossier’s claims and that the Russia-Trump rumors he’d passed along to Steele came from “word of mouth and hearsay.” 

In May 2017, Trump fires Comey; mere days later, the FBI reopens contact with Steele — whom it now knows to be 100% discredited — and launches a new probe, the one the RCI team targeted with its FOIA demand. 

That probe was launched by then-Acting Director Andrew McCabe and signed off on by FBI General Counsel Jim Baker and McCabe’s No. 2, Bill Priestap. 

Enter special counsel Robert Mueller — and cue two years of endless sound and fury from national Democrats and their lapdogs in the media, wall-to-wall TV coverage and frothy-lipped insanity from Resistance schizoids across the country. 

Mueller, of course, would go on to turn up . . . absolutely no evidence of any kind Trump was a Russian asset, ever, in any way. 

Period. 

So you don’t have to be Picasso (or Vassily Kandinsky) to connect the dots about what the FBI is still hiding and why. 

No one can know for sure until the Bureau tells the truth, but it’s beyond likely that the redacted “articulable factual basis” of the 2017 probe is both non-factual and non-actionable. 

I.e., nothing more than a toxic combo of Steele Dossier hogwash and an FBI vendetta over Comey. 

Recall that probe initiator McCabe hinted publicly that the latter was the case in a 2019 interview with CBS news.

And that probe co-signer Baker played a major role in laundering the Dossier’s claims (he was also serving as deputy GC at Twitter when the app killed our 100% accurate Hunter Biden reporting in a blatant case of election interference). 

The FBI’s failed coup — let’s call it what it was — against a sitting American president remains one of the most shameful chapters in the Bureau’s already-shameful history. 

It owes the American people a full accounting. 

That its leadership still, even now, feels it has the right to lie and conceal and delay and deny proves beyond any doubt that President-elect Donald Trump is more than justified in his plan to shake the Bureau to its foundations.