(PresidentialWire.com)- Donald Trump had declassified hundreds of documents to reveal FBI abuses during the Russia collusion investigation.
According to interviews and documents, the U.S. Justice Department refused to abide by a later order to release the materials after redactions were made, citing privacy concerns instead.
Just hours before Trump left office on January 20, 2021, at noon, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, wrote a memo that detailed how highly anticipated declassified material never became public.
The memo from Meadows said that on January 19, 2021, Trump declassified a binder containing hundreds of pages of secret FBI documents that show how the agency spied on the Trump campaign using informants and FISA warrants and misled Congress and a federal court about the flaws in the evidence they presented to obtain authorization for the investigation.
An intelligence court authorized the FBI’s declassified final FISA warrant. The released records also included the tasking instructions and debriefings of the two primary confidential human sources, Stefan Halper and Christopher Steele, who the FBI employed to investigate whether Trump had conspired with Russia to rig the 2016 election.
Ultimately, multiple investigations concluded that there was no such partnership and that the FBI had lied to the FISA court and broken the law to prolong the inquiry.
Trump formally declassified the documents, and the president instructed the DOJ to quickly make them public after redacting any necessary private information through Meadows, but they were never released.
In a Tuesday night appearance with the television show “Just the News, Not Noise,” Meadows voiced his disgust that the DOJ rejected a reasonable request from the US president. He continued by saying that this episode represented a more significant trend in which the federal bureaucracy has consistently worked to undermine Trump to defend itself.
Meadows said that the swamp is relatively deep, however, when you look more closely, this particular president was all about draining the swamp, and throughout his campaign, it was more of a cliché. When he got there, he discovered that they would fight back and that the swamp was much deeper than one could imagine.
