Coleen Rowley, the former FBI agent that exposed the Bureau’s pre-9/11 failures, said Russiagate began as an incident that, at most, would have been grounds for a secret counter-intelligence investigation, but was turned into “a public lynching without any evidence.” As a consequence, “it has put us on the verge of confrontation with a nuclear superpower, and led to us revoking the First Amendment of publishers to publish information.”