Ex-White House official and lawyer Kash Patel on Sunday said former President Donald Trump has been engaged in a “bureaucratic battle” to declassify documents well before the FBI raid on his Florida home.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Patel, who served as chief of state of the acting secretary of defense in the Trump White House, said Trump has legally declassified troves of documents.
“President Trump made me his representative a month ago, and we've been in a bureaucratic battle,” he said. “We found whole sets of documents we got out to the American public … about 60%.”
He said Trump “made it his mission to declassify and be transparent.”
“In October 2020, he issued a sweeping declassification order for every single Russiagate document and every [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton document,” Patel said.
“He … declassified whole sets of documents. And this is a key fact, President Trump as a sitting president is a unilateral authority for declassification," he said. "He can literally hand over a set of documents and say these are now declassified, and that is done with definitive action immediately.”
According to Patel, the National Archives “referred this to the Department of Justice.”
“But they … failed to refer Hillary Clinton to the Department of Justice when they got their hands on the classified e-mails from those servers,” he lamented.
Patel asserted the Mar-a-Lago raid on Aug. 8 will adversely affect the public’s future access to important documents.
“As a former national security prosecutor in the national security division where this case is being run out of … this is a, quote-unquote, ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation,” he warned. “You will never be allowed to see the Russiagate docs or any other docs that President Trump lawfully declassified, and they will hide it from the public.”
"Congress has a monumental list ahead of them come November,” he added. “They better start subpoenaing these documents immediately. Merrick Garland and FBI director Chris Wray have failed in their mission to uphold the law. They are completely destroying our Constitution and putting on a two-tiered system of justice."