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In court filings last week the Department of Justice deployed what could be the nuclear option in its latest effort to prevent President Trump from declassifying information regarding FISA warrants used to spy on his campaign aide Carter Page: It is claiming that such a move would interfere with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
This is the first time the DOJ has explicitly made this argument implying personal peril for the president, since interference could open Trump to charges of obstruction of justice. Until now, the department has argued that declassifying the documents threatened national security.
In the 178-page court document, DOJ officials said they had “determined that disclosure of redacted information in the Carter Page FISA documents could reasonably be expected to interfere with the pending investigation into Russian election interference."
That rationale has heightened suspicions among congressional investigators that the special counsel is being used to prevent the disclosure of possible FBI abuses and crimes committed during the Russia probe. Opened by the FBI in July 2016, the Russia investigation was taken over by Mueller when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him special counsel in 2017.
By the DOJ’s logic, according to one source, the fact that the investigation is ongoing protects it from scrutiny, including the president’s.
Neither the Department of Justice nor the Office of the Special Counsel would respond directly to this charge.
"The obstruction trap was built into the special counsel," a congressional investigator told RCI, speaking, like the two other sources in this article, only on condition of anonymity. “If Trump fires Mueller, or Rosenstein, or declassifies documents [embarrassing to the FBI] it’s likely to bring an obstruction charge.”
And that would mean double jeopardy for Trump. “Obstruction is the instrument the Democrats are likely to use to impeach Trump if they win the House,” said the congressional source.
The upshot is that the president will likely hold off on declassification, at least until after the midterms in November, and congressional investigators are likely to be stymied, at least for now, in their quest to expose what they call Obama-era surveillance abuses.
The DOJ’s latest decision to not declassify the documents came in response to a March 2017 Freedom of Information Act request from a nonprofit, the James Madison Project, seeking records related to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications or warrants to monitor the Trump campaign and associates.
In July, the Justice Department released heavily redacted versions of the four warrants taken out on Page. They confirmed the House Intelligence Committee’s February memo arguing that the warrant relied on Clinton-funded opposition research, the so-called Steele dossier. Now congressional oversight committees are requesting declassification of 20 pages from the final Page warrant.
The response to the Madison Project further fed a suspicion that the special counsel was intended from the beginning to be a mechanism to protect senior officials, by circumventing lines of authority that might have proved more favorable to shedding light on the Russia investigation.
“Rosenstein knew there was no collusion case,” said a second congressional source. “But he still appointed Mueller as special counsel. That took the Russia investigation away from the FBI and gave Rosenstein ultimate control of it. It’s not an investigation, it’s leverage.”
The sources told RCI that the president and the DOJ are at a standoff. “Trump knows that what’s in those documents clears him of all the collusion stuff,” said a third congressional source, “and it shows the FBI was doing some very bad things.”
More at ..
https://www.realclearinvestigations...ties_a_trump_fisa_release_to_obstruction.html
This is the first time the DOJ has explicitly made this argument implying personal peril for the president, since interference could open Trump to charges of obstruction of justice. Until now, the department has argued that declassifying the documents threatened national security.
In the 178-page court document, DOJ officials said they had “determined that disclosure of redacted information in the Carter Page FISA documents could reasonably be expected to interfere with the pending investigation into Russian election interference."
That rationale has heightened suspicions among congressional investigators that the special counsel is being used to prevent the disclosure of possible FBI abuses and crimes committed during the Russia probe. Opened by the FBI in July 2016, the Russia investigation was taken over by Mueller when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him special counsel in 2017.
By the DOJ’s logic, according to one source, the fact that the investigation is ongoing protects it from scrutiny, including the president’s.
Neither the Department of Justice nor the Office of the Special Counsel would respond directly to this charge.
"The obstruction trap was built into the special counsel," a congressional investigator told RCI, speaking, like the two other sources in this article, only on condition of anonymity. “If Trump fires Mueller, or Rosenstein, or declassifies documents [embarrassing to the FBI] it’s likely to bring an obstruction charge.”
And that would mean double jeopardy for Trump. “Obstruction is the instrument the Democrats are likely to use to impeach Trump if they win the House,” said the congressional source.
The upshot is that the president will likely hold off on declassification, at least until after the midterms in November, and congressional investigators are likely to be stymied, at least for now, in their quest to expose what they call Obama-era surveillance abuses.
The DOJ’s latest decision to not declassify the documents came in response to a March 2017 Freedom of Information Act request from a nonprofit, the James Madison Project, seeking records related to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications or warrants to monitor the Trump campaign and associates.
In July, the Justice Department released heavily redacted versions of the four warrants taken out on Page. They confirmed the House Intelligence Committee’s February memo arguing that the warrant relied on Clinton-funded opposition research, the so-called Steele dossier. Now congressional oversight committees are requesting declassification of 20 pages from the final Page warrant.
The response to the Madison Project further fed a suspicion that the special counsel was intended from the beginning to be a mechanism to protect senior officials, by circumventing lines of authority that might have proved more favorable to shedding light on the Russia investigation.
“Rosenstein knew there was no collusion case,” said a second congressional source. “But he still appointed Mueller as special counsel. That took the Russia investigation away from the FBI and gave Rosenstein ultimate control of it. It’s not an investigation, it’s leverage.”
The sources told RCI that the president and the DOJ are at a standoff. “Trump knows that what’s in those documents clears him of all the collusion stuff,” said a third congressional source, “and it shows the FBI was doing some very bad things.”
More at ..
https://www.realclearinvestigations...ties_a_trump_fisa_release_to_obstruction.html
