Trump Orders Declassification of Some FBI Russia Probe Reports

© Bloomberg Agency Chiefs Testify Before Senate Intelligence Committee On Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

He also ordered the declassification of FBI reports on interviews related to Page as well as reports of interviews with Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr regarding the Russia investigation, according to a Monday statement from White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.

Trump also ordered the public release of all text messages relating to the Russia investigation of several current and former officials, including two who were fired — former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe.

Trump took the rare step after a small group of conservative House Republicans asked him to declassify documents related to the Justice Department’s Russia investigation.

The president and his allies have claimed the documents will expose fatal flaws in the origin of the investigation, which is now run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and includes whether Trump or any of his associates conspired with Russia to interfere in the election. Trump has referred to the surveillance of Page as “Spy-Gate” and has called the broader a “witch hunt” that is “rigged” against him.

Trump and his supporters have repeatedly attacked the FBI and Justice Department for relying partly on a dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele in order to get the warrant. They contend that Justice and FBI officials didn’t fully disclose that Steele was paid in part by Trump’s rival in the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton.

“We are confident that the FISA applications will prove that the highest levels of the DOJ and FBI failed to provide the FISA court with critically important information when they requested a warrant to spy on Carter Page and others,” Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin of New York said at a news conference on Sept. 6.

Democrats have said other information besides the Steele dossier was used to obtain renewals of the warrant.

© Associated Press FILE – In a Nov. 2, 2017 file photo, Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, speaks with reporters following a day of questions from the House Intelligence Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Donald Trump claimed Sunday, July 22, 2018, that newly released documents relating to the wiretapping of his onetime campaign adviser Carter Page “confirm with little doubt” that intelligence agencies misled the courts that approved the warrant. But lawmakers from both parties say the documents don’t show wrongdoing.(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)The original warrant request to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court called Page “an agent of a foreign power” and said “the FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government,” according to the document.

Not all Republicans have backed the president’s characterization of the surveillance. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has said the FBI did nothing wrong in making its request to the secretive court.

“I have a different view on this issue than the president and the White House,” Rubio said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on July 22. “They did not spy on the campaign from anything and everything that I have seen.”

A heavily redacted version of the application to conduct surveillance on Page was released in July in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The application was made in October 2016 to the court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and was renewed three additional times, including in 2017, after Trump took office.

Referring to Trump as “Candidate #1,” the application also said “the FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s campaign.”

The application included a footnote more than a page in length saying the person who approached Steele never advised him “as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia.”

“The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign,” according to the application.

Page left the Trump campaign in September 2016, a month before the surveillance warrant was sought. He hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing and has said that while he had conversations with Russian officials, he wasn’t an agent of the Russian government.

Zeldin and other Republicans said Sept. 6 that they also wanted to see all of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr’s FD-302s — forms used to summarize FBI interviews. They suspect that the Ohr documents will elaborate on the FBI’s relationship with Steele.

Ohr, a former associate deputy attorney general, has drawn increasing scrutiny from Trump after he learned that Ohr’s wife once worked for Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele. On Aug. 20, the president wrote on Twitter, “Will Bruce Ohr, whose family received big money for helping to create the phony, dirty and discredited Dossier, ever be fired from the Jeff Sessions “Justice” Department? A total joke!”

–With assistance from Mark Niquette.

To contact the reporters on this story: Chris Strohm in Washington at cstrohm1@bloomberg.net;Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert, Bill Faries