US President Donald Trump has ordered the “immediate declassification” of materials related to the surveillance of his campaign aide Carter Page, as well all text messages related to the Russia investigation.
The decision was made at the request of a number of congressional committees and “for reasons of transparency,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Monday.
Trump’s order instructs the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Department of Justice – including the FBI – to immediately declassify pages 10-12 and 17-34 of the June 2017 application to the FISA court, used to justify surveillance of Carter Page, as well as “all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all Carter Page FISA applications.”
The order also applies to “all FBI reports of interviews with Bruce G. Ohr prepared in connection with the Russia investigation” and “all text messages relating to the Russia investigation, without redaction, of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr.”
Ohr is a former high-ranking DOJ official who met repeatedly with British spy Christopher Steele, author of the notorious “Trump dossier” funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign through the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Ohr’s wife, Nellie, was employed by Fusion GPS at the time.
Comey served as the FBI director until Trump dismissed him in May 2017; Comey’s notes on meetings with Trump served as the pretext for appointing Special Counsel Robert Mueller. McCabe, Comey’s deputy, was officially fired in March for leaking to the media and “lack of candor,” just days before qualifying for a federal pension.
Strzok was a senior FBI counterintelligence agent involved in investigating both Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and the allegations of Trump’s collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election. He was fired last month. Page, an FBI special counsel, worked on both investigations while conducting an extramarital affair with Strzok; their text messages, discovered by the DOJ inspector-general, revealed open hostility for Trump and his supporters.
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