Donald Trump’s declassification stunt is already a disaster

| 9:57 pm EDT September 17, 2018
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Earlier this evening Donald Trump decided to essentially fire off everything he had left in his pile of distractions, when he ordered the declassification of the FISA surveillance warrant against Carter Page, as well as text messages exchanged by various people investigating the Trump-Russia scandal. As we explained, there is likely to be nothing of any substance in these documents, and it’s simply the only desperate move that Trump had left. Now it turns out the stunt is already a disaster.

It turns out the Department of Justice and FBI don’t even know what to do with Trump’s order, and that according to Politico, “they think it’s possible that the White House is just doing it on its own and could release this material as early as Monday night.” Wait, what? So not only is Trump planning to simply dump a bunch of classified information out into public view, he’s planning this garbage dump for as soon as later tonight. It gets stranger.

The anonymous New York Times op-ed and the Bob Woodward book have revealed that Donald Trump’s handlers sometimes end up simply ignoring his most dangerously deranged orders, either hoping Trump forgets he gave the order, or ostensibly allowing him to think the order was carried out. So there’s no guarantee that the White House will even release these documents. If the documents are dumped out publicly, Trump would be looking at yet another felony obstruction of justice charge for attempting to interfere with an ongoing investigation into his own criminal antics.

So will Donald Trump’s White House end up releasing these classified and unredacted documents? At this point that’s anyone’s guess. But as we explained, if these documents contained anything that could magically get Trump off the hook, he’d have released them a long time ago. This is a stunt aimed at distracting the media for a few days, and nothing more.