A federal judge ruled against a multiyear effort to further declassify information from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act filings related to onetime Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
Amit Mehta, an Obama-appointee judge for the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., agreed with the Justice Department in a three-page opinion that President Trump’s tweets and a White House press release did not constitute formal declassification orders. The Monday ruling reinforced a March decision, which reached a similar conclusion.
The Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was filed in 2017 by investigative journalist Brad Heath, formerly of USA Today and now of Reuters, and the James Madison Project, and more than 400 pages of heavily redacted Page FISA documents were released as a result of it in June 2018. The plaintiffs have sought further FISA disclosures for nearly two more years.
Last month, Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham posted versions of the Page FISA application and renewals that were unredacted a bit more than in 2018.
The James Madison Project argued that the court should reject the Justice Department’s hundreds of pages of redactions because two tweets from Trump “cast doubt on the good faith bases for the redactions and withholdings made by the Government.”
The first Trump tweet in question, sent on July 22, 2018, said: “Congratulations to @JudicialWatch and @TomFitton on being successful in getting the Carter Page FISA documents. As usual they are ridiculously heavily redacted but confirm with little doubt that the Department of ‘Justice’ and FBI misled the courts. Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam!”
Trump’s second tweet, sent the next day, claimed: “It was classified to cover up misconduct by the FBI and the Justice Department in misleading the Court by using this Dossier in a dishonest way to gain a warrant to target the Trump Team. This is a Clinton Campaign document. It was a fraud and a hoax designed to target Trump….”
The Justice Department said in March that “in their motion for summary judgment, Plaintiffs relied on two tweets that they claim reflect the President’s criticism of the redactions, but these vague and nonspecific tweets, based on no personal knowledge and not commenting on the precise issues presented to the Court, are insufficient to overcome the presumption.”
Mehta agreed, ruling that “neither tweet causes the court to doubt the agency’s declarations in this case.” The judge said, “The President’s tweets amount to little more than ‘a mere assertion of bad faith [that] is not sufficient to overcome a motion for summary judgment.’”
“Although Plaintiffs tout that the tweets ‘come from the highest governmental authority,’ neither tweet reveals any personal knowledge on the part of the President with respect to the actual withholdings and the exemptions invoked,” Mehta added.
The judge also said, “The President’s statement that the disclosed records are ‘ridiculously heavily redacted’ does not undermine the validity of the [Justice Department’s] invocation of” specific FOIA exemptions. And Trump’s “insistence that the records were ‘classified to cover up government misconduct’ is unsupported and, without more, cannot overcome the national security justifications put forward in the detailed affidavits submitted by Defendant,” Mehta said.
The lawyer for the James Madison Project, Bradley Moss, told the Washington Examiner that options are being explored regarding an appeal.
“In a mere three years, Donald Trump has managed to help produce reams of judicial case law standing for the idea that presidential tweets on national security matters are irrelevant,” Moss said. “Today’s decision was just another reminder of that legacy.”
Trump promised FISA declassification action for a long time, and in September 2018, a White House press release said that Trump was directing his agencies to “provide for the immediate declassification” of a number of materials, including “pages 10-12 and 17-34 of the June 2017 application to the FISA court in the matter of Carter W. Page” and “all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all Carter Page FISA applications.”
The plaintiffs in the FOIA case contended that the press release reflected a presidential order to declassify the pages they were seeking. The Justice Department disagreed, arguing that the message came from then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and that Trump’s subsequent tweets were clear enough to rescind any prior request.
Associate Deputy Attorney Bradley Weinsheimer submitted a declaration to the court in August 2019, arguing that the “DOJ did not receive at any time a declassification order related to the materials remaining at issue in this case.”
Mehta sided with Trump’s Justice Department in March.
“DOJ’s declaration now makes clear that the Press Release was not a declassification order,” the judge ruled. “Plaintiffs’ protestations to the contrary, which lack any evidentiary support, therefore ring hollow.”
Moss told the Washington Examiner at the time that “this ruling is reflective of the chaotic mess the president’s unorthodox tweeting and actions cause, and the struggles DOJ continues to endure trying to translate that chaos into something similar to standard government processes.”
Trump caused some confusion in September 2018 when he appeared to walk back the White House press release.
“I met with the DOJ concerning the declassification of various UNREDACTED documents. They agreed to release them but stated that so doing may have a perceived negative impact on the Russia probe. Also, key Allies’ called to ask not to release,” Trump tweeted. “Therefore, the Inspector General has been asked to review these documents on an expedited basis. I believe he will move quickly on this (and hopefully other things which he is looking at). In the end I can always declassify if it proves necessary.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report in December that criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA surveillance of Page, who was never charged with wrongdoing, and for its heavy reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier.
Recently declassified footnotes from Horowitz’s report show the FBI was aware that Steele’s dossier might have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
Last April, Trump hinted that he might be moving toward declassifying more of this information. Last May, Trump gave Attorney General William Barr “full and complete authority to declassify information” related to the origins of the federal investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Barr selected U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the Trump-Russia investigators.
