Former President Donald Trump‘s final declassification request was blocked by the Justice Department after he left the White House, new records reveal.
The memo by Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows that was delivered on the morning of Jan. 20, 2020, noted the Justice Department “must” release the binder of declassified documents about the flawed Trump–Russia investigation, following a Privacy Act review. The Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland does not appear to have released the records despite the declassification order from Trump and the last-minute memo from Meadows.
Republicans have also been pushing Garland to make the records public since early 2021 to no avail. The Jan. 20, 2021, memo was made public by Just The News after a visit to the Trump collection at the National Archives.
Meadows told the DOJ the Office of Legal Counsel had said the Privacy Act doesn’t apply to the White House, but that “we do not intend to disclose materials that would violate the standards of the Privacy Act.” The Trump chief of staff nevertheless asked the DOJ to review the records for anything that might run afoul of the spirit of the privacy law.
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“Accordingly, I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice (including all that appear to have a potential to raise privacy concerns) with the instruction that the Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied,” the Meadows memo ordered.
There remains an air of mystery about the documents covered by Trump’s own eleventh-hour declassification memo on the day before Biden’s inauguration. The memo mentioned a binder of materials related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation that Trump said the Justice Department provided to the White House at his request on Dec. 30, 2020.
“I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy,” Trump said on Jan. 19, 2021.
The memo from Trump noted he had “determined that the materials should be declassified to the maximum extent possible.” The FBI said in mid-January 2021 that the bureau had “identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure.”
Trump said at the time he would “accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI” and ordered the rest of the documents to be declassified and made available by the Justice Department. That hasn’t happened.
Meadows provided insights into the declassification struggle within the Trump administration in his 2021 book.
“The DOJ or the FBI would consistently push back when he asked for the remaining documents to be declassified,” Meadows wrote. “In these final weeks, when the President’s request was once again ignored, he demanded that these documents be brought to the White House and I personally went through every page, to make sure that the President’s declassification would not inadvertently disclose sources and methods. DOJ had finally allowed key documents to be declassified and yet minutes before Joe Biden would be sworn in, they were trying to redact information they had just provided.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) have been pushing for answers from the Biden DOJ since early 2021 and said in February that Garland told them the review was “ongoing.” They told the attorney general that the DOJ “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.”
Grassley’s office told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that the senator continues to call on the Justice Department to release the documents and that his staff sought clarity this week on whether DOJ ever even conducted the initial step of the privacy review directed to be done in January 2021.
Trump had repeatedly called for all of the Russia investigation documents to be made public.
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“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” Trump tweeted in October 2020, adding that “all Russia Hoax Scandal information was Declassified by me long ago.”
The Justice Department told a court: “The President’s recent statements on Twitter referencing the ‘declassification’ of information were not an order to the Department of Justice to declassify the materials.” Meadows also told a judge that month that the president’s tweets were not declassification orders.
