News/Commentary

More leaks: Press reports Trump told top advisers he preserved certain Russia hoax docs to keep enemies from destroying them

September 8, 2022 | | Print Article

New reporting from the establishment press suggests that at least some of the documents recovered from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last month pertained to the Russian collusion delusion hoax and conspiracy theory.

Citing anonymous sources, Rolling Stone magazine reported Wednesday that during his final days in office, Trump “told top advisers he needed to preserve certain Russia-related documents to keep his enemies from destroying them.”

“The documents related to the federal investigation into Russian election meddling and alleged collusion with Trump’s campaign. At the end of his presidency, Trump and his team pushed to declassify these so-called ‘Russiagate’ documents, believing they would expose a ‘Deep State’ plot against him,” according to Rolling Stone.

“According to a person with direct knowledge of the situation and another source briefed on the matter, Trump told several people working in and outside the White House that he was concerned Joe Biden’s incoming administration — or the ‘Deep State’ — would supposedly ‘shred,’ bury, or destroy ‘the evidence’ that Trump was somehow wronged.”

Just to be clear, Trump WAS wronged. Federal investigators initiated an investigation into his 2016 campaign based on false premises. During the investigation, they told blatant lies to obtain search warrants on his top advisers. And all for nothing, as the investigation ultimately concluded in Trump’s favor.

Rolling Stone’s report continues by noting that ever since the Mar-a-Lago raid, neither the FBI nor Trump have specified what sort of documents were retrieved during the raid. And so for the time being, there’s no way to know for certain whether “Russiagate” documents had indeed been stored there.

However, the establishment outlet continues, the evidence certainly points to there having been Russian collusion delusion hoax and conspiracy theory-related documents stored at the former president’s Florida estate.

“[B]oth Trump and his former Director of National Intelligence have hinted that Russia-related documents could be among the materials the FBI sought,” according to Rolling Stone.

Indeed, during a recent radio interview, Trump said, “I think they [the FBI] thought it was something to do with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. They were afraid that things were in there — part of their scam material.”

Likewise, during a recent interview with CBS News, former DNI John Ratcliffe said, “It wouldn’t surprise me if there were records related to [Russia] there.”

Supposing that Trump did take the Russian collusion documents home with him, the question becomes why. The evidence suggests he wanted to publicly release the documents. Indeed, that’s exactly what he tried to do before he left office. But unfortunately, the documents wound up never being publicly released at the time, mainly because of interference from the deeply biased Department of Justice.

“In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made,” according to Just The News.

The documents included “transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.”

These documents were never publicly released despite then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows writing a memo explicitly calling for their release.

“I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice (including all that appear to have a potential to raise privacy concerns) with the instruction that the Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied,” he wrote in the memo.

The problem is he made the mistake of writing the memo only moments before Trump left office. The moment current President Joe Biden took office, the memo no longer appeared to apply. This brings us back to what happened to the documents afterward.

“[I]n a series of podcast interviews recorded before the FBI search, former Nunes and Trump official Kash Patel shed some light on the administration’s broader plans. He claimed Trump had asked him to help retrieve and publish so-called ‘Russiagate’ material the White House counsel’s office had sent to the National Archives in the last days of the administration,” according to Rolling Stone.

And so it appears that after the Justice Department refused to publicly release the documents, Trump may have brought them to Mar-a-Lago. If this is indeed what happened, what then remains unclear is why he didn’t release the documents himself before the FBI scooped them up in last month’s raid.

Vivek Saxena
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