Lawyers from the US Department of Justice told a federal judge on Tuesday the department had no intention of totally declassifying documents related to the Russiagate investigation, despite US President Donald Trump’s tweets to that effect, since it hadn’t been given an official order to release unredacted files.
On October 6, Trump tweeted he had “fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to” the FBI’s investigation of alleged collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and the Russian government. The investigation, which presented its findings in a two-volume March 2019 report, found no evidence a crime had been committed, prompting a counter-investigation by the Department of Justice into why such a probe had been launched to begin with.
However, despite Trump’s Twitter decree, no formal command was given to actually begin the process of declassifying, without redactions, more than 4,000 pages of FBI reports related to Russiagate, DoJ lawyers claimed in court on Tuesday.
“The Twitter statements do not constitute a self-executing declassification order,” they said. “Indeed, they provide no more authority to the Department to declassify material that the Presidential Memorandum giving the Attorney General authority to declassify information that the President signed on May 23, 2019. As with that memorandum, the President’s Twitter statements do not require the declassification of any particular documents and have not resulted in the declassification of any FD-302s [FBI interview summaries] at issue in this case.”
The DoJ further notes it “was further informed that the President’s statements on Twitter do not require altering any redactions on any record at issue in this case, including but not limited to, any redactions taken pursuant to any discretionary FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] exemptions.”
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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