On Tuesday afternoon, on his last night in office, President Trump declassified a cache of documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
“At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Trump said in a statement. “Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public.” You can read the document below.
“I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form,” Trump added. “I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible. In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021.”
Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the FBI investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. The Special Counsel’s famed “Mueller report” later found that the evidence did not support claims that Trump and his surrogates “conspired” or “coordinated” with the Russian government.
The president has repeatedly accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation—and Democrat partisans within the agency—of conspiring against him for political reasons.
Trump noted that the FBI continues to object to “any further declassification of the materials in the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure.”
Trump said he will accept the redactions requested by the FBI this past weekend.
“I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.” Trump declared. “My decision to declassify materials within the binder is subject to the limits identified above and does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law. Accordingly, at my direction, the Attorney General has conducted an appropriate review to ensure that materials provided in the binder may be disclosed by the White House in accordance with applicable law.”
On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released hundreds of documents related to his committee’s investigation into the Crossfire Hurrican operation.
“I believe that Crossfire Hurricane was one of the most incompetent and corrupt investigations in the history of the FBI and DOJ,” the senator said in a statement. He posited that FBI leadership under James Comey and Andrew McCabe was either “grossly incompetent” or they “knowingly allowed tremendous misdeeds.”
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