McFarland: UK intelligence played key role in collusion probe

FPI / March 15, 2020

A top official in British intelligence intimated that the UK assisted in the Obama administration's investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion during the 2016 election, former Trump administration deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland said.

McFarland, who served as national security adviser Michael Flynn's deputy for the first four months of the Trump administration, told Just the News that as Trump was preparing to take office in January 2017 she was contacted by British Deputy National Security Adviser Patrick “Paddy” McGuinness.

The contact occurred around same time the bogus Christopher Steele dossier was leaked to the U.S. media, the Just the News report noted.

McGuinness said that the British and American intelligence communities work so closely together that “it’s often difficult to see where one ends and the other begins,” McFarland recalled during an interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast.

At the time McFarland said she took the comment to be an obvious reassurance of the famously close relationship between U.S. and UK intelligence services. But “in retrospect, I think it was a signal that their former agent was working very closely with our intelligence agencies," McFarland now says.

“My conclusion was that they had been working closely with the intelligence officials in the Obama administration,” McFarland said.

Late last month, in an interview with Just the News, Flynn defense attorney Sidney Powell confirmed that McFarland was contacted by McGuinness. Powell said that Flynn had received a parallel communique from Britain's national security adviser which called into question Steele’s credibility within British intelligence circles.

McFarland's new best-selling book "Revolution: Trump, Washington and We the People" includes several new revelations about the Trump-Russia hoax.

In early January 2017, McFarland recalled, she was at a briefing with Trump, Flynn, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Admiral Michael Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency (NSA). The topic of the meeting was a variety of security issues, “but focusing on Russian interference in the election,” she said.

McFarland described the mood of the room as “extremely frigid and frosty.” Several of the four agency heads, whom McFarland calls “the four amigos, because they were anything but friendly,” understood that Trump had no intention of keeping them on once his term commenced.

According to McFarland, at the end of the meeting Comey held Trump back to alert him to the Steele dossier.

McFarland says Trump left the room looking “pretty angry.”

“In retrospect, I think that was a blackmail attempt," says McFarland. "Comey had information on Trump. It all turned out to be lies, Comey knew it was a lie.”

Comey has acknowledged telling Trump about the dossier that day but had claimed his intentions were not untoward. Comey told Congress back in 2018 he understood that reporters had the most salacious parts of the dossier and he feared it could become public soon, once journalists had a “news hook.”

About the same time, the FBI would interview Steele’s primary source, who would disavow much of what the former MI6 agent had attributed to him in his dossier. But McFarland maintains that it was Comey’s way of saying to Trump that “the FBI knows this information, and it could come out.”

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