The Mar-a-Lago Raid Was About Burying the Fake Russia ICA

Nunes and Patel never stopped working on exposing the Deep State’s efforts to destroy Trump, and we’re finally getting close to indictment territory.

Ron Wright | June 25, 2026

In recent days, Chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board Devin Nunes delivered a blunt confirmation on national television that aligns precisely with the investigative reporting I have published at American Thinker since the FBI’s unprecedented raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022.

The raid was never primarily a routine “classified documents” case. It was a desperate Deep State operation to recover and suppress a declassified congressional oversight report that exposed the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) as a politicized, flawed, and weaponized document at the heart of the Russia collusion hoax.

Nunes, who was then the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, led the painstaking investigation into the origins of the Russia narrative and repeatedly connected the dots. The House Intelligence Committee produced a detailed oversight report criticizing the ICA’s dishonest tradecraft: its reliance on uncorroborated sources (including the Steele dossier), its dismissal of dissenting analyst views, and its skewed conclusion that Vladimir Putin actively favored Donald Trump.

President Trump declassified this report before leaving office. According to Nunes, elements within the Intelligence Community feared Trump retained the only physical copy outside their control—making Mar-a-Lago a high-priority target.

This revelation should surprise no one who has followed the pattern of weaponization since 2016. The same officials and institutions that launched Crossfire Hurricane, pushed the Steele dossier, and sustained the Mueller investigation years after its premises collapsed were still operating in 2022—now under a Biden administration desperate to prevent Trump’s return.

In August 2022, I analyzed how the Mar-a-Lago raid had the hallmarks of political retribution rather than legitimate law enforcement. The timing (just before the midterms), the theatrical use of force, the shifting public justifications, and the selective focus raised........

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