CNN
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday declassified numerous documents from the FBI’s 2016 2016 investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia. This is the latest example of using the power of his office to relate past political dissatisfaction.
In signing Executive Action, Trump completed the process he began on the last day of his first term when he ordered the full declassification of the FBI’s Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane.
That effort led to behind-the-scenes scramblings when Republican aides and Trump officials worked to collect and edit binders filled with highly classified material. Trump officially classified the documents during his last day of office on January 19, 2021, but the documents were not made public. As CNN first reported in 2023, an unstripped copy of the binder has mysteriously disappeared.
Among the contents of the binder was contacted with information about the Russian investigation, including the highly sensitive raw intelligence that Russia and its NATO allies gathered together Russians and Russian agents. The material may be edited in public documents.
It also included classification information regarding the FBI’s problematic foreign intelligence report monitoring warrant for 2017 Trump campaign advisers. including interview notes such as text messages and emails from the infamous related documents, Christopher Steele and internal FBI and DOJ.
Trump said in his memorandum that it should be categorized as material proposed by the FBI for compilation in January 2021 and “materials that must be protected from disclosure in accordance with the orders of the Foreign Intelligence Report Monitoring Court.”
“My instructions have already begun the process to release material related to the FBI’s infamous Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which is something that will never be allowed to happen again, at the worst stage of a weaponized government against President Trump,” Attorney General Pam Bondy said in a statement.
Tuesday’s order is one of several ways since Trump took office after Russia’s investigation as part of his broader crackdown on his perceived political opponents and those who have investigated him over the past eight years. Trump also signed an executive order on Tuesday, directing the agency to suspend security clearance and access to the federal buildings of lawyers from Jenner & Bullock today.
The law firm previously employed former prosecutor Andrew Weissman. He led the success of the 2016 campaign leader Paul Manafort’s prosecutor and was one of the top prosecutors in Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Trump’s allies have been pushing for the release of binders since the election, including FBI director Kash Patel.
“Send the document. Please give the evidence. We only got it halfway through the Russiagate hole,” Patel told Fox News in November before being tapped to lead the FBI. “People need to know that it’s being restored by fully knowing what the FBI did to illegally monitor them.”
In response to the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the FBI released several compiled documents from the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation. But according to a lawsuit filed earlier by Solomon to obtain binder documents from the Biden administration, conservative journalist Trump said he tapped in 2022 as representative of an archive seeking to obtain the documents.
CNN’s Evan Perez contributed to this report.
