The newly declassified annex to former special counsel John Durham’s final 2023 report ties George Soros to the Russiagate scheme by placing a key grantmaking entity of the Democratic megadonor at the advent of the FBI investigation.
According to the 29-page document declassified Thursday, intelligence gathered from foreign actors indicated that a Soros associate knew the FBI would play a role in pushing the Russian collusion plotline before the bureau ever launched its Trump-Russia investigation, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016.
The annex said Russian intelligence operatives had reportedly hacked and gained access to the emails of numerous U.S. nonprofit organizations, including Open Society Foundations, the main grantmaking outpost of the Soros nexus, funded primarily by the billionaire financier.
“Two of the apparently hacked emails appear to have originated from the Open Society Foundations,” per the Durham appendix.
OSF senior vice president Leonard Benardo, then-OSF’s regional director for Eurasia overseeing “efforts relating to Russia and the former Soviet republics,” was the purported author of these emails, according to the annex.
In one of Bernardo’s supposed emails, dated July 25, 2016, he seemingly predicted that the FBI would help out former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign plan to tie President Donald Trump to Russia.
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“The media analysis on the [Democratic National Committee] hacking appears solid … Julie [Clinton campaign adviser] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce,” Benardo allegedly wrote. “Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”
In the other email, according to the annex’s findings, Bernado said two days later, “HRC approved Julie’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections.”
“That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level,” Benardo allegedly continued. “The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue. Say something like a critical infrastructure threat for the election to feel manic since both POTUS and VPOTUS have acknowledge the fact IC would speed up searching for evidence that is regrettably still unavailable.”
After reviewing further communications involving Clinton foreign policy adviser Julianne “Julie” Smith, Durham’s team ascertained the Clinton campaign “might have wanted or expected the FBI or other agencies to aid that effort (‘put more oil into the fire’) by commencing a formal investigation of the DNC hack.” This indeed happened, and the resulting special counsel investigation would consume years of Trump’s first term.
“The Office’s best assessment,” the Durham annex stated, “is that the July 25th and July 27th emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based Think Tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment, and others.”
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In a statement responding to the Durham annex’s declassification, OSF pushed back against the allegations implicating the Soros organization.
“The claim that the Open Society Foundations helped orchestrate an FBI investigation is an outrageous falsehood,” an OSF spokesperson told Fox News. “It is grounded in malicious disinformation traced to Russian intelligence and now weaponized as part of a politically motivated campaign to attack our leadership and our work to promote human rights.”
OSF’s representative added: “The Durham report found no wrongdoing by our staff. We are a nonpartisan organization and do not engage in political campaign activity. These accusations are not just reckless, they are dangerous. They reflect a broader effort to foment hostility and undermine civil society—and they are calculated to distract from real scandals.”
According to the Durham annex, when Bernardo was shown the emails in question by special counsel investigators, the OSF executive said “they did not look familiar to him, and that he would not have used certain terms, such as ‘oil into the fire.’”
“Benardo also did not know who ‘Julie’ [was],” as referred to in the emails, the appendix says. “Benardo stated that, to the best of his recollection, he did not draft the emails.”
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Durham’s team interviewed FBI personnel involved in Crossfire Hurricane regarding the reliability of the information. Based on their assessment, the analysts and intelligence officers believed the Benardo emails to be “likely authentic.” But the FBI ultimately ignored the intelligence suggesting Clinton was behind the Russian collusion narrative and went on to investigate Trump aggressively during and after the 2016 election.
The annex also mentioned memos detailing “confidential conversations” between then-Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and two senior OSF officials, Bernardo and Jeffrey Goldstein, OSF’s senior policy advisor for Eurasia until August 2016.