According to a truly disturbing deep dive report from the New York Times, Donald Trump and his now former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had conducted a sickening plan in the final days of Trump’s term, in which they rushed to redact and declassify sensitive, private FBI files that they would then turn over to Conservative journalists were sympathetic to Donald’s woes, in hopes that the private information would go public.
The Times reports that the heinous plan was concocted just three short days before Donald Trump would be forced to vacate the White House, but was ultimately shut down and abandoned by Meadows upon the realization, after advice from legal experts, that he and other government officials could be in serious conflict with federal privacy laws that could leave them vulnerable to serious legal troubles.
“In Mr. Trump’s last weeks in office, Mr. Meadows, with the president’s blessing, prodded federal law enforcement agencies to declassify a binder of Crossfire Hurricane materials that included unreleased information about the F.B.I.’s investigative steps and text messages between two former top F.B.I. officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who had sharply criticized Mr. Trump in their private communications during the 2016 election,” the New York Times reports.
The report goes on to reveal that officials with the FBI expressed their concern regarding allowing anything from the private files to go public, but Mark Meadows “dismissed those arguments, saying that Mr. Trump himself wanted the information declassified and disseminated.”
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“Just three days before Mr. Trump’s last day in office, the White House and the F.B.I. settled on a set of redactions, and Mr. Trump declassified the rest of the binder,” the NYT goes on to reveal. “Mr. Meadows intended to give the binder to at least one conservative journalist, according to multiple people familiar with his plan.”
Ultimately, the plan was canned after Meadows was scared off, as the Times reveals, “Justice Department officials pointed out that disseminating the messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page could run afoul of privacy law, opening officials up to suit.”
The New York Times pointed out that the files in question regarding the corrupt plan between Mark Meadows and Donald Trump were not the same documents and materials that were seized from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound two weeks ago, in connection to a search warrant handed down against the estate by the Department of Justice and personally signed off on by Attorney General Merrick Garland himself.
You can read the full bombshell report from the New York Times here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
