He’s ordered the release of many unredacted texts from officials involved in the Russia investigation.
President Trump just dramatically escalated his efforts to interfere with the Russia investigation.
Late Monday afternoon, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders released a banal-sounding statement: that, “for reasons of transparency” and in response to requests from Congress, President Trump has directed the Justice Department to declassify a whole bunch of materials related to the Russia investigation — the ongoing inquiry into his own campaign — immediately.
Those materials include a few specific things Trump wanted declassified: certain sections of the Carter Page FISA application (but, notably, not other sections of it) and FBI interviews related to Page, as well as FBI interviews with Justice Department official Bruce Ohr.
The real bombshell, though, was in the second paragraph of Sanders’s statement: “President Donald J. Trump has directed the Department of Justice (including the FBI) to publicly release all text messages relating to the Russia investigation, without redaction, of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr.”
In other words, the president is demanding the release of an enormous amount of internal material, without redaction, about an ongoing investigation into his campaign and his associates.
Those text messages could discuss all manner of things, including, potentially, investigators’ suspicions, secret evidence, investigative methods, and information on confidential sources whose lives could be put at risk (if his instruction to release them “without redaction” truly is carried out).
The president has declassified minor materials before, but he’s done never done anything as wide-ranging as this. And he’s doing this days after his former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, finally agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s team.
