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President Donald Trump has declassified a wealth of documents related to the early days of the FBI's investigation into Russia, including part of a covert surveillance warrant application and text messages from former FBI director James Comey.
Trump made the extraordinary move on Monday in response to calls from his congressional allies who said they thought Russia's investigation was tainted by anti-Trump prejudices within the FBI and the Justice Department. Trump has continued his efforts to undermine the investigation of special advocate Robert Mueller following the guilty plea of his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and the ongoing grand jury investigation. on a longtime partner, Roger Stone.
Trump's decision will result in the publication of text messages and documents involving several senior officials of the Justice Department and the FBI that Trump has repeatedly attacked over the past year.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced Trump's decision in a written statement, saying the president had ordered the office of the national intelligence director and the justice department to declassify documents "at the request of several congressional committees, reasons of transparency ". It was not known how long the documents would be published.
In statements Monday night, the Justice Department and the office of National Intelligence Director Dan Coats said they were working together to comply with Trump's order, which triggers a declassification review by various agencies "to to guarantee the security of American interests. "This review is ongoing.
According to the statement, Trump declassified 21 pages of the June 2017 application to renew a mandate obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to monitor former Trump campaign advisor communications in 2016.
These pages represent only a small portion of the 412 pages of FISA applications and Page Judgments issued by the FBI earlier this year in a heavily edited format.
The June 2017 application was the last of four applications filed by the Department of Justice in support of FISA court orders allowing the Page. His communications have been followed for almost a year since October 2016.
According to the redacted version, three of the declassified pages contain information included in a section titled "The Coordinated Efforts of the Russian Government to Influence the 2016 US Presidential Elections". This section includes a reference to the potential coordination between those associated with the Trump campaign and the election interference effort in Russia.
The other 18 pages seem to relate to information presented by the government about former British spy Christopher Steele before the presidential election. Steele was a long-time FBI informant whose democracy-funded research on Trump's ties to Russia has been compiled into a file that has become a partisan lightning rod since its publication in January 2017.
In addition to the FISA application pages, the President declassifies all FBI reports documenting the interviews related to the monitoring mandate of the page, as well as those documenting interviews with Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice Department official, in contact with FISA. Steele.
According to Sanders' statement, Trump also ordered the Department of Justice to publicly publish the entirety of the messages from Comey, Ohr, of former Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, of the old FBI lawyer and former FBI special agent Peter Strzok. investigation.
This decision comes after a small group of Republicans in Congress, allied with Trump, held a press conference last week asking him to declassify the documents. Democrats have criticized this effort, saying the GOP lawmakers were trying to discredit the Justice Department in an effort to protect Trump from Mueller's investigation.
Trump made a similar move in February when the White House, despite objections from the FBI and the intelligence community, paved the way for the Republican-led House intelligence committee to issue a partisan note on the issue. supervisory mandate. Weeks later, the Democrats released their own note.
The revelations were unprecedented, as the secret court's surveillance warrants are highly classified and are not intended to be publicly disclosed, including to accused who are preparing or awaiting trial.
The declassification of documents was quickly praised by Trump's allies in Congress and attacked by Democrats.
"Transparency is winning – it's absolutely the right call from @POTUS," said Rep. Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina, on Twitter. Meadows, who had called for the release of the documents, said it would allow the Americans to decide "what happened at the highest level of their FBI and the Department of Justice."
And Republican No. 3 in the House, Louisiana Rep Steve Scalise, tweeted that Trump has made the right call.
"Americans deserve the truth about these blatant acts committed by government officials," said Scalise.
But California representative Adam Schiff, a member of the House's Democratic Intelligence Committee, called Trump's decision "abuse of power" to promote a "false narrative" to defend him against the investigation. from Mueller.
Schiff said the FBI and the Justice Ministry had said that the publication of documents would cross a "red line" as this would compromise sources and methods.
Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland and New York representative Jerrold Nadler, the Democracy and Home Monitoring Committees, said in a statement that Trump's actions were a "frenetic and direct response" to the recent guilty plea and Mueller .
"With the walls coming close to him, President Trump mocks this extraordinarily irresponsible and irresponsible publication of classified information in a desperate attempt to divert the attention of the seven guilty pleas and growing evidence of multiple criminal enterprises among its closest advisers ". they said.
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