Hillary Clinton approved plan hatched by campaign aide to 'smear' Trump with Russia collusion - declassified docs | 21 July 2025 | Hillary Clinton approved a plan hatched by a top campaign adviser to "smear" then-candidate Donald Trump with false claims of Russian collusion and distract from her own mounting email scandal during the 2016 campaign, according to explosive intelligence files declassified Thursday. The intelligence came from two memos obtained by the Obama administration in the lead-up to the Clinton-Trump contest and laid out "confidential conversations" between members of the Democratic National Committee and liberal billionaire George Soros's Open Society Foundations. The plan included "raising the theme of 'Putin's support for Trump'" and "subsequently steering public opinion toward the notion that it needs to equate" the Russian leader's political influence campaign with actual hacking of election infrastructure. "Clinton approved a plan proposed by one of her foreign policy advisors, Julianne Smith, to 'smear Donald Trump by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican candidate,'" one of the declassified memos read.