CNN
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday declassified a host of materials from the FBI’s 2016 investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia, the latest instance of Trump using the power of his office to relitigate his past political grievances.
In signing the executive action, Trump completed a process he started during the final days of his first term, when he ordered a full declassification of the FBI’s Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane.
That effort led to a behind the scenes scramble as Republican aides and Trump officials worked to collect and redact a binder filled with highly classified material. Trump officially declassified the material on January 19, 2021, during his last full day in office, but the documents were never made public. An unredacted copy of the binder ended up mysteriously disappearing, as CNN first reported in 2023.
Among the binder’s contents were reams of information about the Russia investigation, including highly sensitive raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election. That material is likely to be redacted in the documents that are being released publicly.
It also included classified information about the FBI’s problematic foreign intelligence surveillance warrants on a Trump campaign adviser from 2017; interview notes with infamous dossier author Christopher Steele, and internal FBI and DOJ text messages and emails, among other documents.
Trump noted in his memorandum that material the FBI proposed for redactions in January 2021 should remain classified, as well as “materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”
“At my direction, the Department of Justice has already started the process in order to release materials related to the FBI’s infamous Crossfire Hurricane investigation, an example of weaponized government against President Trump at its worst that must never be allowed to happen again,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
Tuesday’s order is one of several ways Trump went after the Russia investigation since returning to office, as part of his broader crackdown on his perceived political enemies and those who have investigated him over the past eight years. Trump also signed an executive order Tuesday today directing agencies to suspend the security clearances and access to federal buildings of lawyers from the firm Jenner & Block.
The law firm previously employed former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who led the successful prosecution of Trump’s 2016 campaign leader Paul Manafort as one of the top prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Trump’s allies have pushed for the release of the binder since his election, including his FBI Director, Kash Patel.
“Put out the documents. Put out the evidence. We only have gotten halfway down the Russiagate hole,” Patel said on Fox News in November, before he was tapped to lead the FBI. “The people need to know that their FBI is restored by knowing full well what they did to unlawfully surveil them.”
The FBI in 2023 released some redacted documents from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. But John Solomon – a conservative journalist Trump tapped as his representative to the Archives to try to obtain the documents in 2022 – said the disclosures were insufficient, according to a lawsuit Solomon had previously filed to try to obtain the binder documents from the Biden administration.
CNN’s Evan Perez contributed to this report.
