President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an order to finally declassify documents related to the FBI‘s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation, which probed whether there was ‘collusion’ between the president’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
Trump has long called the FBI ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ probe a ‘hoax’ and it sucked up months of media attention during his first term.
During an event with ambassadors Tuesday, Trump took time at the top to sign several executive orders, including the Crossfire Hurricane declassification memo.
‘It gives the media the right to go in and go and check it, you probably won’t bother because you’re not going to like what you see,’ the president explained. ‘But this was total weaponization. It’s a disgrace.’
The order declassified everything to do with the investigation that the FBI hadn’t marked for redaction days before Trump departed the White House in January 2021.
It also didn’t apply to materials protected by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the order read.
‘Is anybody going to look? What about you, are you going to look?’ Trump asked the reporters in the room.
‘Frankly the FBI should be ashamed of themselves and so should the Department of Justice and so should Biden,’ he added.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday to finally declassify documents dealing with the Crossfire Hurricane investigation – which looked into whether there was collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia
Trump had originally tried to declassify the materials on January 19, 2021, one day before he left office the first time.
Once Democratic President Joe Biden took over the documents didn’t see the light of day.
Republicans, including Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, complained that Biden’s Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland was dragging its feet.
‘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,’ Grassley complained in a letter alongside Republican Sen. Ron Johnson dated February 2022.
Last Monday, Grassley and Johnson sent a letter to Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel demanding to finally see the documents.
The letter was obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.
They said that the secrets contained in the documents will ‘expose corruption’ within the FBI.
Special Counsel John Durham’s 2023 report had already tainted the Russia investigation, which was handed off to Special Counsel Robert Mueller after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the investigation in 2017.
The documents, according to two Republican senators, will ‘expose corruption’ at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (pictured)
In 2019, Durham had been assigned by Trump Attorney General Bill Barr with looking at the origins of the Russia probe.
Durham’s report found that the Department of Justice and the FBI ‘failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law’ when launching the Trump-Russia probe in 2016, several months before Election Day when Trump was an active presidential candidate.
Durham writes in the report: ‘Based on the evidence gathered in the multiple exhaustive and costly federal investigations of these matters, including the instant investigation, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.’
The Mueller Report, which was released in April 2019, found that Russian interference in the 2016 election was ‘sweeping and systemic’ but didn’t find sufficient evidence to say that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia.
It did detail several obstructive episodes involving Trump, including the president’s wish to fire Mueller and his dangling of pardons for several officials involved.
