On July 31, 2025, Senator Grassley released a previously classified appendix to Special Counsel John Durham’s 2023 report on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. This 24-page annex, declassified with the help of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, exposes the Clinton campaign’s effort to falsely tie Trump to Russia – all to distract from Hillary Clinton’s own email scandals. And right at the center? Leonard Benardo, Senior Vice President of Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF), whose purported emails and confidential conversations with DNC officials reveal the plan.
Let’s break it down. Back in 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained memos describing “confidential conversations” between then-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and top Open Society executives, including Benardo and Jeffrey Goldstein. These talks revolved around a scheme to smear Trump with bogus claims of Russian ties, using “special services” and opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign and DNC. Fusion GPS, the firm behind the infamous Steele Dossier, was part of this effort – a dossier we now know was riddled with lies and used by the FBI to spy on Trump associates.
But it gets worse. In late July 2016, the FBI received what Durham’s team assessed as “likely authentic” emails purportedly from Benardo himself. In these messages, Benardo outlines a plan approved by Clinton to “demonize Putin and Trump” by amplifying stories of Russian hacking into the DNC – ironically, to shift focus from her private email server. He brags about leveraging FBI-affiliated outfits like CrowdStrike (the firm that investigated the DNC hack) and ThreatConnect to feed info to the media, expecting the FBI to “throw oil into the fire” and escalate the narrative.
When Durham’s investigators interviewed Benardo in May 2021, he denied authoring the exact emails but admitted some phrasing – like lamenting the “ghastly” state of U.S.-Russian relations – sounded like him. Durham concluded these emails were likely composites from Russian hacks of U.S. think tanks, including OSF. Yet, the FBI under James Comey did nothing to investigate this intelligence. They dismissed it as “not credible” without lifting a finger, even as they aggressively pursued the phony Steele Dossier to obtain FISA warrants on Trump aide Carter Page.
Benardo is not a lower-level figure at OSF. According to the OSF website:
As a senior leader, he works with the chair, deputy chair, board, and executive leadership to maintain the ongoing vitality and stability of the Foundations. Programmatically, he stewards two major efforts: the Ideas Workshop that seeks to promote and inspire heterodox thinking and cultural imagination; and the Open Society University Network, a billion-dollar effort to promote research and teaching across the globe through a network of higher–education institutions and other organizations.
Benardo also has quite a history with Russia himself:
He began his work with the Open Society Foundations at the Soros Foundation Moscow and was the founding director of the Open Society Fellowship Program. Benardo sits on the boards of Central European University, Hungary, the American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan, the European Humanities University, Lithuania, and Bard College, United States.
In response, OSF may be protesting too much, with this frenetic, over-the-top denial:
The claims that Open Society helped orchestrate an FBI investigation are outrageous and false. They are grounded in malicious disinformation that has been traced to Russian intelligence and is now being used in a politically motivated campaign.
The Durham report found no wrongdoing by our staff. Open Society is a nonpartisan organization that does not engage in political campaign activity. The false accusations against our staff are not just reckless but also dangerous.
They reflect a broader effort to foment hostility and undermine civil society—and they are calculated to distract from real scandals.
This isn’t just ancient history. It’s a stark reminder of how Soros’ vast fortune – funneled through organizations like Open Society – has become a ubiquitous and malevolent force in American politics. Now, we see his foundation’s executives allegedly coordinating with the DNC and Clinton team to propagate one of the biggest political hoaxes in U.S. history, costing taxpayers millions and dividing the nation.
