But of course.Earlier this month, Trump declassified the four-page memo prepared by aides to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee chairman, detailing the handling of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants for a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. The memo indicated that the applications for the warrants relied on information from the dossier.
[...]
During a hearing on a bid by BuzzFeed to get more information about how a so-called dossier compiled by a former British spy was handled, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta grew frustrated with a Justice Department lawyer who argued that Trump’s declassification order did not alter the contours of the legal dispute.
Mehta said the government would normally be entitled to deference in asserting the need to keep its investigative work under wraps, but perhaps no longer with respect to the dossier.
“This isn’t the ordinary case,” Mehta told a Justice Department lawyer, Anjali Motgi. “I don’t know of any time the president has declassified the fact of a counterintelligence investigation. That’s going to be a hard sell given what the president has done. … This is a new frontier and it has an impact.”
[...]
While Motgi sought to stress that a letter from White House counsel Don McGahn accompanying the Nunes memo indicated that the executive branch wasn’t endorsing the memo’s contents, Mehta wasn’t buying that.
“You think the White House would have let a factually inaccurate memo go out to the public?” the judge asked skeptically. “Are you telling me that the Department of Justice is at odds with the president of the United States about the factual accuracy of the Nunes memo?”
[...]
Regardless of how Mehta rules on the issue before him, Trump’s declassification of the Nunes memo is already something of a gift to BuzzFeed.
An attorney for Buzzfeed, Nathan Siegel, said the website never tried to demand confirmation of the use of the dossier in the Page surveillance application because such facts are normally so closely held by the government.
“I never would have believed we’d ever get it,” Siegel said. “We didn’t even think we should ask for it.”
[...]
Motgi insisted that the fact that the FBI or another agency had those pages of the dossier wouldn’t prove anything significant related to the libel suit BuzzFeed is facing, because it wouldn’t necessarily show that information was being investigated.
“Mere possession of a document doesn’t constitute an official government proceeding,” she said.
“Aren’t you looking at this way too narrowly?” the judge replied.
At another point, Mehta, an Obama appointee, warned the government attorney: “You may want to be careful about what you’re going to say.”
[...]
There are several Freedom of Information Act cases pending that could also be affected by Trump’s declassification move.
[...]
In one of those FOIA cases on Wednesday, government lawyers notified the court that the president’s declassification actions forced them to withdraw a refuse-to-confirm-or-deny response issued on requests that USA Today reporter Brad Heath and the pro-transparency James Madison Project made for surveillance warrants on Trump associates.
Justice Department attorneys said they needed time to figure out the precise impact of Trump’s actions. They also alluded to the fact that the president is considering declassifying some version of a rebuttal memo prepared by House Intelligence Committee Democrats, possibly injecting more information into the public domain and further complicating pending litigation.
“Given recent events, and the possibility of additional declassifications by the president,” the lawyers wrote, “the government is unable at this time to propose a timetable to conduct this review.”
Politico
All because a sleazebag, compromised, lying president is being enabled and protected by a sleazebag, compromised and lying GOP.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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