Judge suggests White House counsel is overriding Trump's position on Russia docs
By Katelyn Polantz, CNN
Updated 12:56 PM ET, Fri October 16, 2020
A federal judge -- sensing the White House may be overriding the orders of President Donald Trump as he flails against the Russia investigation -- has given the Justice Department five days to explain Trump's true wishes on declassifying all Mueller investigation documents.
Trump has said in tweets and other statements that he's declassified all records relating to the Russia investigation and Hillary Clinton's emails.
But the White House and Justice Department said this week those pronouncements didn't declassify the records. Officials said they never received an order from the President or from Attorney General William Barr, who could also make public more information.
"It's not the White House that declassifies information. It's the President," Judge Reggie Walton of the DC District Court in Washington said in a hearing Friday. Trump has been "unambiguous" in wanting declassification of more documents.
"Don't I need to know what the President's position is and not what White House counsel's statement is?" Walton added.
CNN, BuzzFeed and the transparency group Electronic Privacy Information Center have sought access to more records and redacted text in documents from the Mueller investigation, especially following the President's tweets. Recent Trump tweets about releasing more Russia documents prompted the hearing in the CNN, BuzzFeed and EPIC cases on Friday.
Walton said in court Friday he needed to know what the President actually wanted -- and if Trump would "retract" his public statements ordering the documents' release.
The judge asked for the White House counsel's office to confer directly with Trump and report back to court by next Wednesday, when he'll hold another court hearing.
"The American public has a right to rely on what a President says his intent is," Walton said.
Walton added he wanted to resolve whether more Mueller records could be released before Election Day.
Courts throughout the Trump presidency have faced novel questions about how official the President's Twitter statements are. In some cases, judges have ruled the tweets from @realDonaldTrump are official statements by the President, such as when courts decided Trump couldn't block some Twitter users from following his public account.
But declassification has been a thornier issue for Trump, whose Twitter account has increasingly seized on disinformation, propaganda and conspiracy that might aid his political screeds as he faces reelection.
In a previous court fight over still-classified pages of the surveillance applications of former Trump adviser Carter Page, a judge ruled that White House statements weren't enough to make the documents declassified and accessible to the public. The White House said the President directed the declassification of those documents, but didn't follow through.
more:
http://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/politics/trump-russia-declassification-lawsuit/index.html
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