President Trump on Monday ordered the Justice Department and FBI to immediately declassify key documents related to the FBI’s investigation on Russian actions during the 2016 presidential election -- including text messages from former FBI Director James Comey and other top officials.
The demand for declassification, announced by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a statement, comes roughly two weeks after a dozen Republican lawmakers called on the president to do it.
The documents ordered declassified are a handful of pages of the June 2017 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to continue surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page, which originally began in 2016. Trump also ordered all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all surveillance applications of Page be declassified and released.
Trump also ordered that all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all Page surveillance applications be released.
Trump also ordered the declassification of all FBI reports of interviews DOJ official Bruce Ohr prepared in connection with the Russia investigation. Ohr had a close relationship with former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier connection Trump to Russia. Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, the same opposition research firm that Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, was contracted by.
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04.26.2024