President Donald Trump takes action to expose what he calls the FBI's "total weaponization" of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation against him.
According to the Daily Mail, Trump signed an executive order Tuesday to declassify documents related to the FBI's investigation into alleged collusion between his 2016 campaign and Russia.
The order enables the release of materials that weren't previously redacted by the FBI days before Trump left office in January 2021. However, it excludes documents protected by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Trump criticized the FBI and Department of Justice during the signing, calling their actions "a disgrace" while challenging media outlets to examine the soon-to-be-released documents.
The Crossfire Hurricane investigation began in 2016 when Trump was still a presidential candidate. Special Counsel John Durham's 2023 report severely criticized the investigation's foundation, stating that law enforcement and intelligence agencies lacked actual evidence of collusion when launching the probe.
Durham's findings revealed that the Department of Justice and FBI "failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law" in initiating the Trump-Russia investigation. The report's conclusions supported Trump's long-standing claims that the investigation was baseless from the start.
Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson have persistently pushed for the documents' release. They recently sent a letter to Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel demanding access to the materials.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which concluded in April 2019, found Russian interference in the 2016 election to be "sweeping and systemic." However, it did not establish sufficient evidence of collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia.
The Mueller investigation did uncover several instances of potential obstruction by Trump. These included his reported desire to fire Mueller and suggestions of pardons for various officials involved in the case.
Trump addressed reporters at Tuesday's event with ambassadors, where he stated:
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. But this was total weaponization. It's a disgrace.
The declassification effort dates back to January 19, 2021, when Trump initially tried to release the materials one day before leaving office. The transition to President Biden's administration halted the process, with Republicans accusing Biden's Justice Department of deliberately stalling.
In February 2022, Senators Grassley and Johnson expressed their frustration in a formal letter. They highlighted that over a year had passed without a single page being declassified despite Trump's directive.
The senators recently escalated their demands, claiming the documents will expose corruption within the FBI. Their push for transparency has maintained pressure on the Justice Department to follow through with the declassification process.
President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday to declassify documents from the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which probed potential ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia. The release of these materials comes after years of Trump denouncing the investigation as a "hoax" and follows Special Counsel Durham's report that found no evidence to justify the probe's initiation. The documents will now be available for media scrutiny, though their contents remain protected by certain FBI redactions and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court restrictions.
