RUTHFULLY YOURS

Washington bureaucrats are already reportedly resisting President Trump’s sweeping good-government transparency order this week directing intelligence agencies to declassify certain documents from the long-running investigation related to the Left’s unproven electoral collusion conspiracy theory involving Trump and Russia.

And they are doing so at the urging of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and other leftists and media figures who wish to precipitate a full-blown constitutional crisis by stripping the president of his unrestricted, constitutionally prescribed power to unliterally declassify government documents at will. These four Democratic lawmakers are alarmed at the prospect of being exposed as frauds and publicly humiliated, which is why they wrote Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday urging resistance to the presidential order.

These left-wingers still can’t accept that Trump trounced Democrat Hillary Clinton on Election Day in 2016 and they are doing everything they can to reverse the verdict the American people rendered that day. It is a continuation of the Obama-era plot to discredit Trump by falsely claiming he is a puppet of Russia.

It is nothing less than a coup attempt by sore losers.

Left-wingers are even claiming the president’s declassification effort is intended to distract from Trump’s various public relations problems such as the criminal conviction of his former campaign manager Paul Manafort for matters unrelated to the campaign.

It’s tedious stuff.

According to a Bloomberg News report, anonymous sources said the Department of Justice (DoJ), FBI, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “are going through a methodical review and can’t offer a timeline for finishing.”

“The agencies responsible are expected to propose redactions that would keep some information secret, according to three people familiar with the matter.”

The Bloomberg article continued:

One person described the order to release text messages as unprecedented, and another said additional talks will probably be held with the White House over the matter.

The Justice Department and FBI are expected to submit their documents and proposed redactions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which will assemble all the material into a package and hand it over to the White House, according to the people.

While the agencies want to guard against revealing classified sources and methods about the ongoing Russia investigation, doing so could put them in direct conflict with Trump, who as president has the power to override the agencies and declassify material on his own.

Of course, if the FBI’s track record in this case is taken into account, the concern about “classified sources and methods” seems especially ridiculous.

This is the same FBI that took the “piss-gate” dossier by a DNC-paid spy seriously. The only people being helped by the continued classification of the documents are likely people who ought to be exposed, and if necessary, prosecuted for breaking the law. President Trump is doing a service to the American people by airing the documents in public.

In an interview with Hill.TV this week, the president said he ordered the mass declassification to show the public that the FBI investigation of the electoral collusion conspiracy theory began as a “hoax.” Exposing it could be one of the “crowning achievements” of his presidency, Trump said.

An NBC News article says much the same thing as the Bloomberg article, even evincing an obvious anti-Trump prejudice right from its first paragraph.

The article tries to elicit sympathy for “U.S. intelligence officials,” claiming they have been “blindsided” by the president’s order. The files to be declassified are described as “highly sensitive,” even though there is no way the authors of the article could possibly possess the information needed to form such an opinion. The documents are classified, after all.

These reports appear to indicate that government employees are acting in direct defiance of the president’s explicit no-redaction order regarding text messages sent by various Obama administration officials. The declassification project was announced this past Tuesday (Sept. 17) in a statement issued by the White House. Redactions in the first batch of documents could be accepted by the president, the wording of his directive suggests.

President Trump ordered ODNI and DoJ to immediately declassify “pages 10-12 and 17-34 of the June 2017 application to the FISA court in the matter of (former Trump campaign aide) Carter W. Page,” “all FBI reports of interviews with [Justice Department official] Bruce G. Ohr prepared in connection with the Russia investigation,” and “all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all Carter Page FISA applications.”

But no redactions are supposed to be made to documents in the second batch.

Those documents consist of “all text messages relating to the Russia investigation … of [former FBI Director] James Comey, [former Deputy FBI Director] Andrew McCabe, [former FBI official] Peter Strzok, [former FBI official] Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr.” (Carter Page and Lisa Page are not related.)

Gregg Jarrett, author of The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump, seems to have foreseen the rise of what could be called the redaction resistance.

Not long after the president made his order public, Jarrett published a column urging the firing of FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for “rank insubordination” if they defy the directive by slow-rolling the release of the documents in hopes of the arrival of a Democratic Party-dominated Congress in January.

Rosenstein, who “appointed a special counsel without proper authority,” in particular, “has every reason to suppress the records,” Jarrett writes.

Jarrett continues:

They may incriminate him. He affixed his signature to the final renewal of the FISA warrant application to continue spying on Carter Page. He vouched for the authenticity and veracity of the information contained therein. But if it was largely based on a “dossier” that was unverified and uncorroborated, Rosenstein may have been complicit in misusing his position of power in pursuit of a president who was wrongfully targeted by the FBI and DOJ.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s declassification order is winning praise from Republicans and conservatives.

“The president is, in his genius way, bypassing the media by releasing the documents in a lawful way to the American people as opposed [to] through the illegal leaks where classified information isn’t protected,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said Wednesday on Fox News Channel. “That’s the traditional Washington way.”

“Keeping this information classified is designed to make it harder for President Trump to defend himself against the lawlessness. And the classification of information related to the FISA warrants, text messages, the mere existence of the FISA warrants, all help protect the Deep State from being held accountable from the misconduct during the Obama administration, well into this administration.”

It is “laughable” to claim the declassification project will hurt the nation’s security, according to Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

It’s laughable that they’re saying this is going to somehow endanger national security. This is, really, full transparency for the American people. This will be all the information really that I think that the American people will need to see because for two years we’ve been force-feeding this Russia Kool-Aid to the American people, so much so that you have the media involved in it, the mainstream media. The poor American people. I feel bad for the some of these people who are part of this resistance movement who actually believe the president is under control by the Russians.

The Deep State declassification drama continues.