Hillary Clinton, Russia collusion and 2016 presidential campaign all of a sudden are in headlines right now because of a court filing from special counsel John Durham, who is investigating the origins of the Democrats’ conspiracy theory against Donald Trump at the time, that claimed Clinton funded teams that worked in “infiltrate” Trump’s own computer servers at Trump Tower, as well as White House servers after he took office.
An apparent case of high-tech spying on a political opponent.
But there’s a solution to most of those arguments over who said what, and when, and why, according to two senators.
That would be to have Attorney General Merrick Garland release and make public “all records” from the FBI’s original investigation into those Democrat claims.
Fox News reports it has obtained a letter from Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., to Garland.
They criticize Garland for failing to follow former President Donald Trump’s original orders for the Department of Justice to declassify all records from that investigation. They want him to “produce those records to Congress and the American people without improper redactions.”
Fox News reported the letter continued, “We remain concerned that over one year from the date then-President Trump directed the Justice Department to declassify certain Crossfire Hurricane records the Justice Department has not only failed to declassify a single page, the Department has failed to identify for Congress records that it knows with certainty to be covered by the declassification directive.”
It was in 2019 after Robert Mueller, the former FBI chief named special counsel to investigate those Democrat claims, finished his investigation, without finding evidence of that collusion, that Trump told Bill Barr, then the attorney general, to start declassifying the information.
The senators originally had written to Garland last year, and last month, he apparently responded.
They then wrote again, “Your letter noted that on July 9, 2021, the Department ‘offered to compare the documents we understand to be covered by the Memorandum with the documents that had been previously provided to Congress.’ However, your letter also stated that the Department ‘has been taking steps to determine’ which documents can be disclosed and that review is ‘ongoing.’”
Instead of those “ongoing” steps, they suggest, it is “incumbent upon the Department to determine which records are covered by the declassification directive.”
That job remains unfinished, even though more than a year has passed, they point out.
“When the Department is able to (1) identify with certainty the records subject to the declassification directive; (2) confirm the records are not those that have already been reviewed by our staff; and (3) agree that no improper redactions will be placed on those records, our staff stand ready to review in camera prior to production to Congress. Absent those conditions, our staff should not have to spend potentially multiple days and countless hours in the Department’s classified facility only to play a guessing game with the Department about what document may or may not be covered by the declassification directive and potentially review records that have already been produced to Congress,” they wrote.
The goal, the senators said, is for the American people “to know the complete truth about the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
The move to release those records was launched under President Trump, when two successive directors of national intelligence, Ric Grenell and John Ratcliffe, worked on the project.
Fox News explained, “Documents declassified to-date included more than 6,000 pages of transcripts of interviews from the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, which revealed, among other things, that top Obama officials acknowledged they had no ’empirical evidence’ of collusion or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016.”
Other documents showed a pattern of Democrats insisting, in emails to themselves, all they were doing was fine, or withholding information from Trump appointees.
Also declassified about then was a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that showed the anti-Trump dossier from ex-British agent Christopher Steele, which was paid for by the Clinton campaign, actually had “limited corroboration.”
Even so, the government under Barack Obama used it to launch an all-out spy campaign against certain Trump campaign individuals.
Uncovered then, too, was a memo that explained that Hillary Clinton, then the Democrats’ candidate, approved a “plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
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