As the legal fighting between former President Donald Trump and the Justice Department continues over the release of information regarding the Aug. 8 FBI raid on Trump’s home in Florida, the Biden administration’s top intelligence officials will be leading an assessment of whether some of the documents are too sensitive to share with the public.
In a court filing last week, the former president’s representation demanded a “special master” review the documents before federal investigators.
Despite a federal judge signaling she’ll likely grant the request, the U.S. intelligence community is already planning to sift through the documents in order to potentially censor them.
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told members of the House Oversight and Intelligence committees that her office would lead “an assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents,” according to documents obtained by Politico.
In a letter addressed to the committee chairs, Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff of California, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, and Carolyn Maloney of New York, who chairs Oversight, Haines explained that her office would be working closely with the Department of Justice to “facilitate a classification review” of the items obtained during the FBI raid.
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On Saturday, Schiff and Maloney confirmed the letter in a joint statement sent to Politico.
“We are pleased that in response to our inquiry, Director Haines has confirmed that the Intelligence Community and Department of Justice are assessing the damage caused by the improper storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago,” Schiff and Maloney said in the statement, according to Politico.
“The DOJ affidavit, partially unsealed yesterday, affirms our grave concern that among the documents stored at Mar-a-Lago were those that could endanger human sources.
“It is critical that the [Intelligence Community] move swiftly to assess and, if necessary, to mitigate the damage done — a process that should proceed in parallel with DOJ’s criminal investigation.”
Do you think this document assessment will be fair to Donald Trump?
None of this smells right.
The Justice Department has had unfiltered access to the documents for over 20 days and now — before an objective, unbiased, third-party “special master” can be appointed — the Biden administration will have the opportunity to censor them however its sees fit — in the cause of “national security,” of course.
And that “national security” determination will be made by the DNI whom Biden appointed months before he was even sworn in, and who was confirmed on his first day in office.
Biden has wielded the DOJ with seeming impunity, targeting his political enemies without fear of facing any repercussions whatsoever.
And now, despite Trump’s transparency throughout this process (just read this rundown of his communications with the FBI since leaving the White House in January 2021), an indictment of the former president still remains on the table.
What makes the situation even more troubling is the fact that Biden has been personally involved since day one.
According to documents obtained by Just the News, back in April, then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was corresponding with the FBI, DOJ and National Archives regarding various supposedly classified materials in the former president’s possession.
In one message, Su acknowledged that Biden himself was not opposed, as Just the News founder John Solomon wrote, to “waiving his predecessor’s claims to executive privilege.”
That decision “opened the door for DOJ” to compel Trump to hand over any and all classified materials he may have had in his possession, Solomon wrote.
The FBI could have asked Trump for any documents he may have had in his possession.
Instead, it sent its agents on an unprecedented raid of the former president’s home, a fishing expedition conducted with the collusion of the current president and other unelected government bureaucrats.
