Trump orders FBI to declassify documents from 'Crossfire Hurricane' Russia investigation.
'This was total weaponization,' Trump said of Crossfire Hurricane.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing the FBI to immediately declassify files concerning the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the agency probe launched in 2016 that sought information on whether Trump campaign members colluded with Russia during the presidential race.
After signing the order, Trump said that now the media can review previously withheld files pertaining to the investigation — although he cast doubt on whether many journalists would do so.
You probably won’t bother because you’re not going to like what you see," Trump said. "But this was total weaponization. It’s a disgrace. It should have never happened in this country. But now you’ll be able to see for yourselves. All declassified."
The FBI on July 31, 2016, opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump, then a presidential candidate, or members of his campaign were colluding or coordinating with Russia to influence the 2016 election. That investigation was referred to inside the bureau as "Crossfire Hurricane."
The opening of the investigation came just days after a July 28 meeting during which then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Barack Obama on a purported proposal from one of Hillary Clinton's campaign foreign policy advisors "to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service." Clinton was the Democrat nominee for president that year.
By January 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey had notified Trump of a dossier, known as the Steele dossier, that contained salacious and unverified allegations about Trump’s purported coordination with the Russian government, a key document prompting the opening of the probe.
The dossier was authored by Christopher Steele, an ex-British intelligence officer, and commissioned by Fusion GPS. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS during the 2016 election cycle.
It was eventually determined that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the dossier through the law firm Perkins Coie.
Trump fired Comey in May 2017. Days later, Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to take over the "Crossfire Hurricane" probe and investigate whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election cycle.
While Mueller investigated, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence opened its own investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion.
By February 2018, Kash Patel — then chief investigator for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and now the FBI Director — had uncovered widespread government surveillance abuses, including the improper surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Patel was an integral part of the creation of a memo released by Nunes in February 2018, which detailed the DOJ's and FBI’s surveillance of Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Nunes and Patel revealed that the infamous anti-Trump dossier funded by Democrats "formed an essential part" of the application to spy on Page.
The memo referred to closed-door testimony from former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who said that "no surveillance warrant would have been sought" from the FISA court "without the Steele dossier information."
But when applying for the FISA warrant, the FBI omitted the origins of the dossier, specifically its funding from Hillary Clinton, then Trump’s 2016 presidential opponent.
The memo also said Steele, who worked as an FBI informant, was eventually cut off from the bureau for what the FBI described as the most serious of violations, "an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI."