The final days of Donald Trump‘s presidency may have been even more tumultuous than previously thought. According to a new report from the New York Times, the twice-impeached former president approved a plan from Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff, that involved giving an FBI file to a conservative journalist.
According to the NYT, then-president Trump agreed with Meadows’s scheme to get a set of redactions approved on a file of FBI information. The goal of this, the Times indicates, was to declassify the document before handing it over to a sympathetic journalist.
According to a deep dive by the New York Times, Donald Trump & Mark Meadows, his White House Chief of staff, rushed to get private FBI files redacted so the former president could declassify them, turn them over to journalists
sympathetic to his admin https://t.co/cfdqx3pFol— Sherry Sherry (@Sherrysherry1) August 22, 2022
The previously unreported volume of sensitive material found in Donald Trump’s possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have. https://t.co/RugOtgEnQK pic.twitter.com/J6bawrZN8A
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 23, 2022
Meadows ultimately received Trump’s blessing to pursue the declassification of the binder, which contained unreleased information about the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. (Crossfire Hurricane is the code name for the FBI investigation looking into purported links between Russian officials and Trump associates. It became the Mueller probe in 2017).
Within the binder, the publication revealed that FBI’s methods in the investigation could be found. It also contained text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two former FBI agents who had been bashing Trump. The hundreds of texts (that were sent in the months leading up to the 2016 election) included a note that deemed Trump to be an “idiot.”
The New York Times revealed that Donald Trump stashed more than 300 classified documents at his Florida home. pic.twitter.com/ZlbzAMll0C
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) August 23, 2022
Meadows allegedly dismissed concerns that declassifying the binder could compromise the FBI, Insider writes, as he said that Trump wanted the messages to be public. On January 17, 2021 (three days before the end of his presidency), a set of reactions was agreed upon. Trump then declassified the rest of the binder. While we know via the newspaper that Meadows’ intention was to give the newly declassified binder to a conservative journalist (according to those familiar with the plan), it is not clear who the journalist was or the outlet they were associated with.
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The elaborate plan to give the binder to a writer was abandoned after Justice Department officials warned Meadows that releasing the messages between Strzok and Page could violate privacy laws, and even lead to lawsuits. As the New York Times deeply analyzed and researched Trump and his associates' handling of documents in his final days as president, this revelation emerged. As Insider writes, Trump's document handling is "in focus at the moment" following the FBI's Mar-a-Lago raid and during the Justice Department's investigation into whether he broke any laws in doing so.
