by Robert Romano
Following Congress’ certification of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election on Jan. 6, all eyes now turn towards Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration and most importantly, to his first days in office and the work to be done in enacting his agenda.
The first president since Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms, Trump has a lot of unfinished business — completing the border wall, extending and expanding his tax cuts, restoring American energy dominance, using tariffs to bolster American production and so forth — but certainly cleaning up the national security apparatus that was weaponized against him before he was ever elected in 2016 has to be a top priority.
And Trump knew it on his way out of office in 2021. On Jan. 19, 2021, the day before he left office, Trump declassified a trove of documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation into him and his 2016 campaign on false allegations that he had conspired with Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta emails and put them onto Wikileaks, charges he was later cleared of by none other than Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
In the Jan. 19, 2021 memorandum, entitled, “Memorandum on Declassification of Certain Materials Related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” Trump outlined how the materials were presented to him to be declassified: “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. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. 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. I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible.”
But not before the FBI complained about the need for redactions, with Trump granting the redactions: “In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its continuing objection 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. I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission.”
The Trump memorandum continued, “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.”
However, that redacted copy was never returned to the White House as ordered. In May 2022, former Trump administration official Kash Patel — now nominated by Trump to be FBI Director — said he witnessed the declassification himself in a phone interview with Breitbart.com, but that the documents remained unaltered and had retained their classified markings: “The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified. I was there with President Trump when he said ‘We are declassifying this information.’”
But the obstruction did not end there. Later, after Trump was out of office, the Biden Administration Justice Department led by Attorney General Merrick Garland never complied with the Trump memorandum, Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) revealed in a Feb. 15, 2022 letter to Garland. It was a follow-up to an Oct. 2021 letter on the same complaining about the lack of disclosure.
Grassley and Johnson wrote in the Feb. 2022 letter, “We remain concerned that over 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.”
Did Biden reclassify the documents? While that at the moment is uncertain, what is certain is that but for Trump’s reelection, and those documents were never supposed to see the light of day.
The years-long, top secret investigation that officially began in July 2016 following false allegations by Clinton campaign operatives that Trump had somehow supported the efforts by Moscow to put the Democratic emails onto Wikileaks, and then was carried over into the Trump administration in 2017, leading to the recusal of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the firing of former FBI Director James Comey and the appointment of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who found no such conspiracy.
The Mueller report ultimately stated, “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” and “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.”
During the course of the investigation, the Justice Department obtained surveillance against the Trump campaign and the GOP, first by targeting campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos via foreign agency efforts beginning in mid-2016, and then with Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications on campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page beginning in Oct. 2016, fueled by the DNC-Steele dossier falsely accusing President Donald Trump, Page and Paul Manafort of being Russian agents, that was renewed after the election and then finally the fateful strike on former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in Jan. 2017, spying on his Dec. 2016 phone call with the Russian ambassador where Flynn attempted to deescalate tensions with Moscow, leaking it to the Washington Post on Jan. 12, 2017, sending the FBI to ask about it on Jan. 24, 2017 — all encompassing the bedrock of a three-year-long Justice Department investigation, undertaken under the mistaken belief that the nation had just elected a Manchurian Candidate.
Now, newly disclosed documents from a redacted Freedom of Information Act request by RealClearInvestigations shows that in May 2017 the probe was expanded to Trump himself, then the sitting president following the firing of FBI Director James Comey who was leading the investigation.
After 2020, former President Trump decided that he was not going to leave office lightly. He was going to take the truth with him. And as Kash Patel noted in the Breitbart.com interview, “he thought the American public should have the right to read [it] themselves.” And now, they can—and likely will. Declassify everything, Mr. President, or this could happen again. And let the chips fall where they may. It is time.
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Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
Photo “Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
