Donald Trump Declassifies all Documents Related to Russia/Collusion and Hillary Emails

Politics & Elections
1

This is quite something. Donald Trump tweeted today:

This follows a number of releases of some newly-declassified documents which at least suggest that not only was Russia/Collusion invented by the Hillary Clinton campaign to distract from her E-mail scandal, but that the CIA knew that Hillary was planning this and briefed President Obama about it beforehand.

If true, this means that all the principles involved in the three year investigation of Trump knew that it was a political hit job right from the beginning.

Yes, it’s a link to Fox News, but I used them because the article has the best set of links to the source documents.

Possibly related, the Justice Department has annouced a press conference for tomorrow morning at 11 AM ‘on a matter of national security’. I have no idea what it is, but coming right after Trump’s order to declassify all documents related to the Russia Collusion investigation, I suspect it’s related. However, it could be them complaining about how dangerous the release of the docs is for national security or something. Or maybe they are going to announce new investigations in light of the release.

Thoughts? My first one was that if Trump was guilty of any collusion at all, he would never have authorized the complete release of all documents without redaction. So at lest HE believs something is there that, if released, will help his re-election. Maybe he’s deluded.

This does seem like a good candidate for an ‘October Surprise’. I’m interested in other ways to interpret this, though. I don’t trust either side to play straight these days, so getting both sides seems to be the only way to make sense of things.

Comments? Speculation on the presser tomorrow? It includes the assistant Attorney General, the current Director of the FBI, the acting head of the Washington Field office of the FBI, and a U.S. attorney for Eastern Virginia.

Based on the players, myt guess is that it looks like some sort of criminal investigation or indictment is coming down inside Virginia related to national security.

2

None of this is true. These aren’t real historical documents – these are political documents with an assist from Putin. This is just political nonsense from Bill Barr and co. Ratcliffe and Barr have zero credibility and have lied publicly on these issues on numerous occasions.

“Thirty-five days before the November 2020 election, Ratcliffe declassifed 2016 Russian disinformation that asserted Hillary Clinton had personally approved a scheme to associate Trump with Vladmir Putin and Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Ratcliffe provided the disinformation to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, who publicly released it. The disinformation had been previously rejected as baseless by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee. Ratcliffe acknowledged in a letter to Graham that the intelligence community “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.””

This stuff literally came from Putin’s intelligence services. It’s complete bullshit.

3

Suppose this is all true. So what? Clinton isn’t the candidate now. Trump has done plenty of other things to disqualify himself as a reasonable President.

4

The source documents are in Brennan’s handwriting. You think this is a conspiracy? That someone planted fake handwritten documents in the archive? I believe Brennan has already said that he wrote the notes.

Do you have any cites? Any evidence at all that your theory is the case?

5

I just posted a cite. This bullshit was rejected by the Republicans in the Senate. It’s completely bogus.

6

Another cite:

Complete bullshit. If you buy into this, the GOP thanks you for your massive gullibility.

7

Brennan was writing and briefing about the bullshit Russian election disinfo they had discovered.

Complete bullshit. Just despicable nonsense. It’s really shameful to spread this kind of bullshit.

Once again, this was a Russian intelligence “assessment”. Meaning election disinfo bullshit. Completely worthless, except as a distraction to aid Trump.

8

It looks like what they’re doing is declassifying documents discussing what Russians were saying about Clinton’s plans, redacting them to hell and back to destroy context, then trying to say that the FBI discussing a claim made by the Russians about what they thought Clinton was doing or might do proves that Clinton was doing what Russia said. It’s nonsense, but of course Fox will eat it up.

9

You and Politico missed the whole point. It’s not whether the Russian info about Hillary was correct, and even Brennan at the time could not verify it. But it does indicate that people had information that Hillary was about to try this attack - and then the attack they were warned about showed up. That should be suspicious as hell.

Also, declassified docs have also shown that Christopher Steele’s ‘source’ for Trump dirt had been recently investigated by the CIA for ties to Russian Intelligence. That information, along with the involvement of Hillary’s campaign in the acquiring of the information, was witheld from the FISA court. Multiple times.

But let’s get back to the main point. Trump is declassifying EVERYTHING, with no redactions. Would you like to speculate on his motives, given that you think the evidence they release will be totally damning to Trump?

10

That’s what it looked like to me to, entirely by reading the Fox piece from the OP. Trump doesn’t need it to be believable to anyone rational. He just needs it to be the basis for nonsense accusations from his loyal senate puppies that Fox and Fox viewers can regurgitate on command.

11

What part of ‘declassifying ANY AND ALL documents WITHOUT REDACTION’ did you not get?

12

What attack? Trump asked the Russians for help, publicly! He praised Putin publicly! It was on TV! Of course she was gonna criticize him for that!

Who cares? Republicans were equally “involved” in acquiring this info. They were trying to find dirt on Trump (Republicans and then Democrats).

Says who? Trump? HAHAHAHA!!! What Trump says has nothing to do with actual reality. You actually believe he’s declassifying “EVERYTHING”? What on Earth could make you believe this?

His motives are chaos, nonsense, corruption, dishonest attacks, etc., as they always are. There’s nothing new here.

13

The fact that this comes in a tweet from a serial liar and clown? What on Earth could motivate you to take a Trump tweet as some sort of serious order/direction/etc., or anything other than clownish, malevolent idiocy from a delirious idiot?

Come on. This is a joke. Trump spouts bullshit. Dog bites man. This is just complete nonsense.

14

What part of “Trump’s tweets about actions he’s taken or will take bear little to no resemblance to reality” have you not gotten in four years of his BS-ing?

15

Why in the hell would you believe he is telling the truth?

16

Oh for God’s sake. He said in a debate watched by millions, “Maybe the Russians could releasse her Emails”. It was clearly a joke play on the Democrat’s claim with no evidence that Russians had hacked the DNC. Not even Trump is stupid enough to ‘collude’ with Russians during a nationally televised debate.

This has to be one of the dumbest arguments that’s been floating around about Trump’s ‘Collusion’.

But if you want to go there, Obama was recorded on microphone whispering to Medvedev to tell Putin that he’d have ‘more flexibility’ to help him after the election. And Hillary handed them a big RESET button. And Obama looked the other way when Putin moved into Syria. If you want to get into wishcasting, speculation based on almost nothing, then Hillary and Obama have much more evidence ON TV! that they were the ones colluding with Russia.

Of course, drawing that conclusion based on those things would be stupid. But not quite as stupid as basing it on a joke told during a debate.

Anyway, would you like to answer the question as to why, if you think the perfidious Trump admin has been ‘selectively’ leaking highly redacted stuff to build a narrative without context, would Trump suddenly declassify everything without redaction?

17

Your repetition of GOP/Trump talking points demonstrates impressive loyalty (and maybe memory), but this is still complete nonsense.

Already answered – there’s no reason to believe Trump is declassifying “everything without redaction”.

18

Then why does your Fox link show heavy redactions?

19

What part of ‘even on Fox’s page, they mention REDACTED several times in their quotes, and if you look at the scanned documents large portions of them are black boxes’? Do you think that Brennan happens to doodle very large, solid black squares while he’s taking notes? Seriously, just LOOK at the document in the article. On P5 (P 1-4 aren’t shown) there are what appears to be 14 double spaced lines blacked out (it could be 28 lines, but I’m assuming he’s writing behind the black the same way he is on the unredacted portion), plus a margin note. On P6 there are what appear to be 17 lines blacked out and 3 lines of text, then on the final page everything but some boilerplate closing is blacked out.

The fact that Trump said “Without redaction” is just the usual Trump blustering, but it’s not surprising that Trump supporters would go by something Trump said rather than a document they can glance at themselves.

20

Um, because he said it publicly, and it would be easy for anyone on the Democratic side of goverment to show that he lied about it?

Maybe that’s what tomorrow’s press conference will be. Maybe the ‘resistance’ inside the goverment will come out and say that Trump lied about declassifying everything, and that the stuff being declassified is selective to help him. Or that they are refusing Trump’s orders because of harm to national security and offering their resignations or something.

But the idea that Trump would say he’s ordered the declassifying of everything when he didn’t doesn’t really pass the smell test for me. Too easy to check. But I’m sure we will find out shortly.