Former Congressman Mike Rogers, who is reportedly in the running to be Donald Trump’s FBI Director pick if Chris Wray is fired, has a history of propagating Russiagate and supporting FISA surveillance.
Rogers, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is reportedly a leading contender to replace Wray as head of the FBI. He served as a Republican representative from Michigan until January 2015, when he transitioned to media work and hosted a CNN program called “Declassified,” which focused on American intelligence issues. Since leaving Congress, he’s worked with various groups friendly with the intelligence community and which perpetuated the Russiagate scandal against Trump.
Rogers ran for Senate in 2024 and narrowly lost to Democrat Elissa Slotkin. While he attended President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign rallies and even received the former president’s endorsement, Rogers was not always a stalwart supporter. He was even an advisor to a group that promoted the Russian election interference narrative.
At the height of Russiagate in 2017, an organization called the German Marshall Fund (GMF) launched the “Alliance for Securing Democracy” (ASD) to tackle alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
ASD was spearheaded by Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy advisor to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign, according to GMF. ASD established an advisory council that included neoconservative never-Trumper Bill Kristol, and future Joe Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Rogers was one of the advisors who worked directly alongside them.
The GMF is funded by various left-wing groups, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation, Brookings Institute and Google. ASD’s main donors in 2023 were the William + Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Klarman Family Foundation, the Sandler Foundation and the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust. Influence Watch described all of those foundations as either “left-of-center” or major donors to “left-of-center nonprofits.”
The Rogers-advised ASD launched the Hamilton 68 Dashboard — now Hamilton 2.0 — to “track Russian influence operations,” specifically 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence efforts online.” This project was the basis for many news reports on alleged Russian influence, including articles by The Washington Post, which later issued corrections.
Matt Taibbi called the project “a scam” in his Twitter Files reporting.
“Hamilton 68 never released the list, claiming ‘the Russians will simply shut [the accounts] down,’” Taibbi wrote. “All those reporters and TV personalities making claims about ‘Russian bots’ never really knew what they were describing.”
“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is,” former Twitter executive Yoel Roth said of the dashboard in 2017, according to emails obtained by Taibbi.
“Falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots,” Roth stated in a 2018 email.
In ASD’s own words, “not all of the accounts are directly controlled by Russia.” Taibbi noted that aside from some Russia Today accounts, “it was mostly full of ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British.”
“It was a scam,” Taibbi concluded.
Hamilton 68 helped fuel the Russian interference narrative, and it was the project of a group Rogers had advised. The website does not currently list him as a member.
Rogers met with Trump’s transition team about a possible position as FBI director, Fox reported. The outlet noted that he was interviewed in 2017 after the dismissal of James Comey from the position.
“President-elect Trump is once again assembling a fantastic administration to help the American people and Make America Great Again,” Mike Rogers Spokesman Chris Gustafson wrote in a statement to the Caller. “We will not be commenting on the President-elect’s decisions at this time.”
The Caller asked about Rogers’ view on Russian interference in the 2016 election, if Russian interference should be a significant focus for the intelligence community and what he would do as FBI director.
The Caller also asked if Rogers believes former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper should still possess a security clearance, but did not receive answers to those questions.
Clapper, who signed a 2020 letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop story had the characteristics of a “Russian information operation,” allegedly lied about leaking the Steele dossier to CNN, according to a House Intelligence Committee report.
Rogers worked with Clapper at Harvard and previously praised his “professionalism.”
“[Clapper] came in and brought a level of professionalism to the DNI, and he brought such gravitas to the job it finally ironed out the wrinkles that we thought would never go away,” Rogers said during a 2017 panel at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics.
While it does not appear that Rogers was directly involved in Hamilton 68, he previously claimed that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.
“Our intelligence community concluded that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election,” he tweeted in 2017. “We should expect them to attempt to do so again. That’s a clear and present danger to our democracy.”
He also co-authored an op-ed with former acting CIA Director Michael Morell on Russian cyber operations in The Washington Post. The article cited ASD’s project to track Russian influence on social media.
“But to get a sense of the breadth of Russian activity, consider the messaging spread by Kremlin-oriented accounts on Twitter, which cybersecurity and disinformation experts have tracked as part of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy,” the article reads.
The Robert Mueller investigation found no evidence to support claims that Trump’s campaign “conspired with Russians.” Notably, the FBI — an agency Rogers may soon lead — played a central role in the Russian interference investigation.
The FBI relied on a dossier from Christopher Steele, a former member of the British intelligence agency MI6. The “Steele Dossier” accused former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and others of conspiring with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election.
Rogers did not say the Trump campaign conspired with Russia and lamented the investigation’s politicization.
“So the biggest shock to me in this whole thing is this whole public denial that the Russians were trying to influence the election at all,” Rogers stated on the panel. “Why we should be surprised is shocking to me if you look at the total history of Russian intelligence service activities, including going back to Latin America.”
Rogers has previously said the Patriot Act needed reform and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) “has been abused to spy on families and political opponents.”
“Now you’re seeing them, an analyst saying that we’re gonna go after Catholics because they may be at risk,” Rogers said during an interview in response to a leaked FBI memo targeting Catholics. “I can’t think of anything more anti American than that.”
However, his record on civil liberties has come under scrutiny. He voted for the Patriot Act in 2001, supported extending it in 2011, and voted to extend the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 in 2012.
Rogers is also a member of the Aspen Cybersecurity Institute. The Aspen Institute is a left-wing think-tank that has hosted events with “antiracist” activist Ibram X. Kendi. Additionally, Rogers is a member of George Mason University’s National Security Institute and is chairman of the MITRE Board of Trustees.
MITRE is a military-intelligence group that has received millions in funding from the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) within the past 12 months, according to USA Spending.
MITRE was part of the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI), a consortium aimed at creating a vaccine passport called the SMART Health Card during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tech companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon Web Services were also involved.
Still, Rogers’ bid for FBI director is apparently being bolstered by the support of establishment-aligned GOP senators — Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn called him a “terrific guy.”
“I am a big fan of Mike Rogers, and should there be an opening, he would be my choice,” Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins stated.
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