Former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker criticized President Trump’s choice to put Attorney General William Barr in charge of declassifying documents related to the Trump-Russia investigation.
In an interview on MSNBC, Baker said declassification authority should be at the discretion of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, not Barr.
“He’s the head of the intelligence community and quite honestly I think this executive order is a bit of a slap in the face to the DNI,” Baker said on Friday. “Because to my mind, it’s the DNI’s job to manage the intelligence community and to find out what happened.”
Baker insisted that Coats had the proper powers to handle this review. “If the president of the United States has questions about what the intelligence community did, the DNI should get to the bottom of it,” Baker surmised.
Trump’s order on Thursday said Barr had been given “full and complete authority to declassify information” and ordered the intelligence community “to quickly and fully cooperate with the Attorney General’s investigation into surveillance activities during the 2016 presidential election.”
Democrats criticized the order. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said Trump and Barr are conspiring “to weaponize law enforcement and classified information against their political enemies.”
Coats released a statement on Friday saying “the Intelligence Community (IC) will provide the Department of Justice all of the appropriate information for its review of intelligence activities related to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.”
Coats emphasized that “as part of that process, I am confident that the Attorney General will work with the IC in accordance with the long-established standards to protect highly-sensitive classified information that, if publicly released, would put our national security at risk.”
