‘Now you’ll be able to see for yourselves,' Trump said of the investigation files.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday
signed a memorandum to declassify files and documents related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation that probed allegations his 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government.
In signing the order, Trump said that the memo “gives the media the right to go in ... and check it.”
“This was total weaponization. It’s a disgrace,” Trump said, referring to the investigation, adding that “now you'll be able to see for yourselves.”
Crossfire Hurricane was an FBI counterintelligence investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign. It was launched in July 2016 to probe allegations of Russian government interference in that year’s election. That included possible ties between Russia and any political campaigns.
In May 2017, under the first Trump administration, former special counsel Robert Mueller took over the investigation. Mueller released a 2019 report that concluded there was no evidence to show that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. The report concluded that the Kremlin did interfere in the 2016 campaign, in “sweeping and systematic fashion.”
Years later, former special counsel John Durham, a former U.S. attorney tasked with investigating alleged FBI malfeasance when it opened Crossfire Hurricane, issued a long-awaited
report faulting the law enforcement agency for opening its investigation into the Russia-Trump allegations.
Durham found that the FBI had rushed to open the investigation based on unverified intelligence from Australia and said its handling of elements within Crossfire Hurricane was “seriously deficient.”
Responding to Durham’s 2023 report, the FBI said it had already implemented changes that were recommended in the report.
“The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time. Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented,” the FBI
said at the time.
A day before he left office during his first term in office, Trump
declassified some previously confidential files related to the FBI investigation. In his first term in office, Trump repeatedly denied that Russia had any involvement in his campaign or administration, repeatedly admonishing news outlets for publishing anonymously sourced or unverified information about those allegations.
Trump’s memo signing comes about a week after Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)
requested that FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi “remove all redactions” from transcripts of interviews related to a separate Justice Department Office of Inspector General’s investigation into Crossfire Hurricane.
