By Brian Trusdell  From Newsmax

The former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell said agents within the U.S. intelligence community raised early warnings that reports suggesting a conspiracy between Russian government officials and the 2016 Trump campaign were fallacious but were ignored or dismissed.

Grenell, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, declassified several documents during his three-month stint as head of the ODNI earlier this year. Among them were transcripts of closed-door testimony before Congress by FBI and CIA officials that indicated they had no evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and that a senior FBI official kept open an investigation into then-incoming Army Gen. Michael Flynn that the investigating agents were about to close.

“Look, I think there are a lot of reports right now that are coming out now that there were early warning signs to the Steele dossier and to the Russian collusion narrative, early warning signs from intelligence officials raising red flags, saying: ‘You know what, this doesn’t make sense,” Grenell told Newsmax TV. “’The Russians are knowing about this. They’re putting out disinformation.’ Propaganda is what we used to call it. This was an early warning system that was ignored.”

Speaking to host Greg Kelly on the “Greg Kelly Reports,” program, Grenell said the FBI and other intelligence agencies have to disclose “what they knew and when they knew it.”

The reference to the Steele dossier was about a document composed by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. It was commissioned by a company seeking opposition research on Trump asked for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was used by U.S. intelligence officials to justify warrants before the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Trump officials. 

It initiated a counterintelligence investigation code named “Crossfire Hurricane” and became the basis for special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the matter.

Grenell said he began to “unwind” some of the reports while running the ODNI.

“But there are several that still need to come out,” Grenell said. “And these reports will show voices within the intelligence community early on, unheard of voices so far, but voices nonetheless, from career intelligence officials saying: ‘This doesn’t stack up. This is not something we should be relying on.’

“Those voices were ignored, and their comments were pushed aside and classified information.”

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