President Trump granted full declassification authority to AG Bill Barr in May of this year. There has been some discussion about Bill Barr not releasing any information. In an interview last week with Sean Hannity, President Trump outlined his thoughts on the declassification issue:
[Transcript] HANNITY: Mr. President, you have the power to literally release the FISA applications and the 302’s and the gang made information and you made a decision to hand it over to the Attorney General and let him decide. And I’m curious as to why?
TRUMP: Well, we have a very respected gentleman, very high quality person named William Barr and he is doing – I can tell you he’s working so hard and rather than just doing a total release, I gave him a total release, in other words he’s got everything anything he needs, he’s got it.
He is the Attorney General of the United States. He’s got a lot of very good people under him that I guess are involved and I gave them a total release. So all of it has been released and he has all of it.
I’ve also given him authorization to release it to whoever he wants. Whether it’s his people or, frankly, perhaps people like Devin Nunes who is a star, what he has done and the amount of suffering he has gone through, you know what they did with him where they tried to drive him right out of politics and probably worse than that. He has done an incredible job.
And, so many others I mean, the job – they are warriors. We have had, I’ll tell you the good side of all of this is the level of intelligence and strength and goodness that we have had on the Republican Party, a lot of them, not everybody, of course, but we have had tremendous, and I say, when I say we I’m talking about the country.
The country has had tremendous reports from Meadows and Jordan and Devin Nunes and so many of the names that you saw yesterday, perform so well. I mean, they perform so well and they worked so hard because they saw this was a scam. This was an illegal takeover, as you would say in the business world.
I mean, this was a coup attempts in my opinion. And this is the United States. And we wouldn’t stand for it and I wouldn’t stand for it. We have some very great people but we also have some very bad people. And I think we caught them.”
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