Former President Donald Trump urged the Justice Department Tuesday to release all remaining documents related to the FBI’s investigation into allegations his 2016 campaign colluded with Russian officials, claiming they show “tremendous dishonesty and corruption.”
“They have the declassification order. And they should declassify, absolutely, especially in the light of what has just happened and what has just been revealed,” the 45th president told Fox News, referring to Special Counsel John Durham’s recent court filing alleging Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid a tech company to mine data from servers at the White House and Trump Tower in a bid to tie Trump to a Russian bank.
Trump initially told then-Attorney General Bill Barr to begin declassifying records related to the FBI investigation of his campaign in 2019.
Last year, on his final full day in office, Trump said he had asked the Justice Department to make public to “the maximum extent possible” records related to the probe that the department had presented him as part of a “binder of materials.”
“We did declassify, and people saw them, and I think you’ll see some big stuff,” Trump said Tuesday, adding: “They should release them.”
It is unclear how many records from the original FBI investigation, code-named “Crossfire Hurricane,” remain classified.
Trump spoke out on the same day that two Republican senators urged the DOJ to step up its efforts to release the records in question.
“[O]ver one year from the date then-President Trump directed the Justice Department to declassify certain Crossfire Hurricane records the Justice Department has not only failed to declassify a single page, the Department has failed to identify for Congress records that it knows with certainty to be covered by the declassification directive,” Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The lawmakers accused Garland of slow-walking the declassification process by claiming that the investigation records were the subject of an “ongoing” review.
“It is incumbent upon the Department to determine which records are covered by the declassification directive and it is clear … that the Department – after more than one year – has yet to get the job done,” Grassley and Johnson wrote, adding that the DOJ is responsible for ensuring any records they find have not already been handed over to Congress and do not include “improper redactions.”
“[O]ur staff should not have to spend potentially multiple days and countless hours in the Department’s classified facility only to play a guessing game with the Department about what document may or may not be covered by the declassification directive and potentially review records that have already been produced to Congress,” they told Garland, before requesting a response by March 1.
On Friday, Durham alleged in a new filing that Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann “assembled and conveyed” spurious claims about the Trump Organization and Moscow-based Alfa-Bank “to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including … the Clinton campaign.”
Sussmann has been charged with lying to a federal agent, and pleaded not guilty in September. He allegedly told then-FBI general counsel James Baker in September 2016 that he was not working on behalf of the Clinton campaign when he handed over documents purportedly detailing the supposed Trump Organization link to Alfa-Bank.
However, Durham claims that Sussmann repeatedly billed the Clinton campaign for calls and meetings with tech executive Rodney Joffe and the campaign’s general counsel, Marc Elias, in which they “coordinated and communicated” about the allegations.
Documents related to the FBI probe were declassified under then-acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell as well as former DNI John Ratcliffe.
On Monday, Ratcliffe told Fox News that that he’d seen intelligence Clinton’s 2016 campaign “was creating a plan to vilify Donald Trump [and] to falsely accuse him of ties to Russia,” and further alleged that the intelligence community and the FBI — as well as then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden — were all briefed on the matter.
