DOJ Blocked Trump’s Declassification of Russian Collusion Hoax Docs in Final Hours of His Presidency

By Mike Miller

Truth be told, I was never a fan of the term “deep state” — reason being, it sounded a bit too shadowy and sinister to me. Too “Tom Clancy-ish,” I thought. My aversion changed significantly after the Obama-era IRS admitted it had targeted Citizens United and other conservative groups, based solely on their names or political objectives. After the Russian collusion hoax scandal broke wide open, I was all in.
 
While the IRS scandal might be in the rearview mirror, information continues to emerge about the Democrat-contrived Russian “collusion” hoax, purposely manufactured to derail Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, and ultimately the Trump presidency. As reported by Just the News on Wednesday, the latest information appears to be the most damning yet; particularly for the Department of Justice:

In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents.
 
The previously untold story of how highly anticipated declassified material never became public is contained in a memo obtained by Just the News from the National Archives that was written by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just hours before Trump left office on noon of Jan. 20, 2021.

Meadows’ memo confirmed prior reporting by Just the News that Trump, on Jan. 19, 2021, declassified hundreds of pages of sensitive FBI documents that show how the bureau used informants and FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Moreover, the documents reveal how the Justice Department misled both a federal court and Congress about inconsistencies in the evidence the DOJ presented to get approval for the investigation. (Serial-liar Adam Schiff was unavailable for comment.)
 
This is fascinating stuff, via JTN:

The declassified documents included transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
 
[…]
 
The documents that Trump declassified never saw the light of day, even though they were lawfully declassified by Trump and the DOJ was instructed by the president though Meadows to expeditiously release them after redacting private information as necessary.

In the end, multiple congressional hearings and the nothingburger Mueller investigation found zero evidence of collusion; but investigators did find that the FBI violated rules and misled the FISA court in an effort to keep the probe alive — despite the fact that documents were lawfully declassified by Trump and the DOJ was instructed by Trump to release them through Mark Meadows, Trump’s then chief of staff. Meadows wrote in an accompanying memo at the time:

I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice (including all that appear to have a potential to raise privacy concerns) with the instruction that the Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied.

So let’s see: lawfully declassified documents, a very concise memo from Trump’s then chief of staff; yet the DOJ usurps presidential powers and blocks declassification, claiming some bogus security excuse.
 
Meadows told JTN on Tuesday he was “dismayed” that the DOJ ignored a lawful instruction from a sitting president and said it was part of a larger dynamic within the permanent federal bureaucracy (see: “deep state”) to repeatedly undercut Trump and protect itself.

Well, you know, the swamp is pretty deep, but when we look at this, this particular president was all about draining the swamp, you know, and when he was running, that was more of a campaign slogan. When he got there, he realized that not only was the swamp very deep, but that they would fight back.
 
And oftentimes he [Trump] said, ‘You know, I want to do this and get this out to the American people; not just the classification in terms of issues that affected him or his campaign personally, but issues that affect the American people.

Meadows in his 2021 memo said White House lawyers told him the DOJ’s last-minute concerns were not legitimate because the executive office of the president was exempt from the Privacy Act.
 
In the interview on Tuesday night, he said he agreed in the final minutes of the presidency to let DOJ make redactions “out of an abundance of caution” and expected the DOJ would comply with Trump’s order.

We wanted to make sure that we didn’t harm anyone. And so we gave them those declassified documents. I want to stress they were declassified documents, and they were to do a final redaction for some of that personal information with the instruction that they were to go ahead and disseminate those. We expected fully that they would do that.

Except they didn’t.
 
Former Trump adviser David Bossie, head of the Citizens United watchdog group — as I noted at the top, one of the groups targeted by the IRS — said the episode is a pointed reminder that the permanent bureaucracy in Washington wields so much power it can thwart the actions of a duly elected president. Not only true, as we’ve learned; but it should scare your socks off if you think about it, properly.

Read more