President Trump Directs the Declassification and Release of FBI Russiagate Files – “the Mar-a-Lago Binder”

Sundance reporting for CTH 

Yesterday President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting: “Immediate Declassification of Materials Related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.” [ORDER TEXT HERE]

Within the XO President Trump informs the Attorney General (Pam Bondi) the Director of National Intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard), and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (John Ratcliffe), “I have determined that all of the materials referenced in the Presidential Memorandum of January 19, 2021 (Declassification of Certain Materials Related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation), are no longer classified.”

However, there’s an important set of qualifiers.

“I have further determined that the material proposed for redaction by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, remains classified.

My decision to declassify the materials described above does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law.” (link)

Caution is warranted.  Yes, there may be a few new items, perhaps a few redactions removed on previously released items, but essentially this is likely be a rehash of assembled component parts we have already discussed at length.  In essence, this sounds like the Mar-a-Lago ten-inch binder content the FBI was previously trying to get back.

There is also a possibility the FISA Court has ordered some materials related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, sealed by the FISC.  President Trump does not extend his order to these materials.

There is a certain likelihood the CIA holds foreign intelligence equities that tangentially supports the origin of the Crossfire Hurricane targeting.  We already know officials and intelligence operations from the U.K, Australia, Italy and Israel were involved in the 2016 operation against Trump.  President Trump does not extend his order to these materials, because the equity ownership of the classified material rests in the foreign intelligence services.

The ODNI, DOJ and FBI are ordered to release their classified equities, and we may glean some new insight or confirmation from the intelligence documents those agencies created.  However, I would not expect to see anything remarkably new, given the qualifiers contained within the Executive Order.  [Example: I would not expect to see the full unredacted outline of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok’s text messages.]

Perhaps we may see a transcript of the FBI created “Flynn cuts.”  This is the transcript between then Nat Sec Advisor Michael Flynn and then Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak; that was an FBI intercept.  I doubt highly the Carter Page FISA application would be released in unredacted form, because it appears to be covered by the XO qualifiers related to the FISC.

So, absent the communication from foreign governments to the CIA, and absent the CIA internal documentation – which is going to be light anyway even if released, the DOJ and FBI background source material on Crossfire Hurricane is likely to be the only material contained in any release.

That said, it would be awesome if there was more, and even if it is only confirmational stuff perhaps more people will awaken to the biggest scandal in American political history.  Which is to say, the prior Obama administration used government agencies (CIA, FBI, DOJ) to target and spy-on the leading candidate for their political opposition in a presidential election.

After their 2016 efforts failed, everything else that followed was a cover-up operation to hide the fact that the Obama administration used the CIA, DOJ and FBI to target, spy-on and ultimately remove their political opposition.

All participants from the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branch then operated to protect themselves from President Trump’s capability to expose the operation in 2017.  Special Counsel Robert Mueller was used for this aspect, and post Mueller the impeachment process was triggered.  The use of Lawfare was part of the cover. The targeting never stopped.