Vice President JD Vance announced in an interview that aired Sunday that a number of people should face indictment for what he called “aggressive violations of the law” during the Trump-Russia investigation, adding that Americans deserve accountability for what he described as a coordinated effort to “defraud” the public.
Speaking to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures, Vance said the recent release of documents by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard shed light on what he characterized as “a years-long coup” against then-President Donald J. Trump after his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Vance argued that the Obama administration allowed intelligence agencies to be weaponized in service of Clinton’s campaign narrative. “Do you want to see indictments?” Bartiromo asked. “Absolutely, Maria,” Vance replied. “Of course you’ve got to have the law follow the facts here.
You don’t just indict people to indict people, you indict people because they broke the law. But if you look at what Tulsi and [FBI Director] Kash Patel have revealed in the last couple of weeks, I don’t know how anyone can look at that and say there wasn’t aggressive violations of the law.”
According to Vance, “They defrauded the American people in order to take Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign talking points and turn them into intelligence… They would take something that supported a Hillary Clinton campaign talking point, and they would overemphasize it and exaggerate it. They took anything that actually contradicted that narrative, and they buried it deep.”
The Vice President alleged that this amounted to “laundering Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign talking points through the American intelligence services.”
His remarks come in the wake of Special Counsel John Durham’s May 2023 report, which found that the FBI “did not and could not corroborate” the core claims of the Steele Dossier.
The dossier, compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, was used to obtain warrants to monitor Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
During a 2022 trial, FBI analyst Brian Auten testified that the bureau offered Steele $1 million if he could substantiate the dossier’s claims. He never did.
“I absolutely think they broke the law,” Vance said. “You’re going to see a lot of people get indicted for that. Here’s the thing that should really bother the American people—what do you want our intelligence community to be doing? I want them to be catching bad guys… I don’t want them laundering Hillary Clinton’s campaign talking points into the American media and giving them this air of legitimacy.”
The dossier’s claims were repeatedly amplified on CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets, fueling the collusion narrative.
In 2022, the Federal Election Commission fined both Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee for their role in funding the since-discredited document.
“It is sick and it’s disgusting,” Vance said. “It hurt the intelligence community, it hurt the American people, and it hurt the first Trump Administration. We’ve got to have consequences for it.”
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