At the end of Donald Trump's presidency, his team returned a large batch of classified FBI documents and other government records to the Justice Department in such disarray that a year later -- in a letter to lawmakers -- the department said it still couldn't tell which of the documents were the classified ones.
The documents came from the FBI's controversial probe in 2016 looking at alleged links between Russia and Trump's presidential campaign. Trump tried to make the documents public the night before he left office, issuing a "declassification" memo and secretly meeting with conservative writer John Solomon, who was allowed to review the documents, Solomon told ABC News this past week.
The story that still emerges, though, from pieces of public statements and Solomon's own accounts is one that sheds further light on how Trump's White House treated certain government secrets. And it helps explain how - in the midst of the FBI probe - Solomon became one of Trump's official "representatives" to the National Archives.By the middle of Trump's presidency, Solomon had become one of Trump's favorite voices in media.
His work at the time was also focused on the FBI's Russia-related investigation and its offshoots, which he described as "a sin against Donald Trump," an "offense against the entire American people," and "arguably the most devious political dirty trick in American history." In its final report on the investigation, the Justice Department's internal watchdog said that while it found "fundamental errors" and significant "failures" in the FBI probe, it found no evidence that "political bias or improper motivation influenced" the investigation, including the decision to eavesdrop on one of Trump's former campaign advisers.
Trump then agreed to some redactions, declaring that everything else in the binder was declassified, according to the memo. He told ABC News the documents he reviewed had redactions, cross-outs and other "markings on them indicating they had been declassified" - though at least some of them were not stamped "declassified," as formally-declassified documents often are.
The document was an FBI report detailing two September 2017 interviews with Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose "dossier" -- much of it since debunked -- was used to separately convince four federal judges that the FBI should be allowed to eavesdrop on a former Trump campaign adviser.Despite such rhetoric, it's unclear how much new information the documents could actually reveal about any FBI missteps or alleged bias in 2016.
According to the memo, which Solomon later obtained, and more recent statements from Meadows, the department raised last-minute concerns about "privacy" and "personal information." So "out of an abundance of caution" the White House gave the documents back to the Justice Department "to do final redactions," he said in an interview with Solomon last December.
Efforts by ABC News to understand why at least two separate tranches of documents were allegedly both in such disarray were not successful. In a court filing Thursday, the department said it is now "processing" 815 pages relevant to Judicial Watch's request and expects to start releasing "non-exempt records" in late December.
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