Trump and the huge mess he left behind in classified FBI documents and other government records

The mess in classified FBI documents and other government records at the end of Donald Trump's presidency was so great that, even a year later, the Justice Department sent a letter to lawmakers telling them it still couldn't say which of the documents They were the classifieds.

According to ABC News, the documents come from the FBI investigation in 2016 that sought the alleged links between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign.

The night before leaving the White House, the former president tried to make the documents publicSo he issued a “declassification” memorandum and secretly met with conservative writer John Solomon, who was allowed to review the documents, Solomon told ABC News.

However, to the great frustration of the tycoon and his political allies, for reasons that are not clear, none of the documents were officially published and yesterday the Department of Justice indicated that it is still working to determine which documents can be disclosed.

The White House wasn't sure what should be revealed,

“[The] Department of Justice has failed to declassify a single page,” Senators Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, complained to the attorney general in February.

Much of what happened to the documents in Trump's final days in office remains a mystery, and has remained unsolved ever since because the current and former administration officials involved have refused to talk about it.

With only a few weeks as president, Trump “demanded” that “key documents” - still classified by the FBI and the Department of Justice - “be brought to the White House” so that they can be "entered into the public record once and for all." by all,” wrote Mark Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff, in a memoir published last year.

On December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice released a folder filled with internal notes, memos, emails, and other records.

The White House wasn't sure what should be revealed, so Trump's team asked a group of Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee to make recommendations, a congressional source told ABC News about the request.

“[It's] a foot and a half of documents, pretty much everything that the FBI had kept out of public view,” Solomon said in an interview with a right-wing website on Jan. 1. on January 14, 2021, predicting that the documents could “be made public tomorrow.”

In the White House they feared that something would happen to him.

But the FBI objected to “any” release, Trump's “declassification” memo said.

Around 7 pm ET on his last full day in office, January 1. 19, 2021, Trump formally issued his “declassification” memorandum regarding those documents, on the same day Solomon reportedly met with him.

“I had a brief interview with President Trump in which he told me unequivocally that he had signed the order to complete the [declassification] and would receive a set of declassified documents to post online for the public,” Solomon said last week in a statement. interview with ABC News.

“Later that day, I was allowed, on two occasions, to briefly review a stack of documents that I was told were the declassified documents. I was not allowed to keep the documents at any time, but was told I would get a full copy.”

Shortly after 9 p.m. ET that day, Solomon appeared on Fox News and said that he had “reviewed all the documents at least once.”

Several people in the White House “feared something was going to happen to the larger lot ,” so they took steps to bring at least “some of the documents,” the writer explained in a separate Newsmax TV interview last month.

On the morning of January 20, 2021, with just two hours to go before Joe Biden became president, Meadows found himself running to the White House to retrieve at least some of the documents, he recalled in his book.

And in a memo to then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen that morning, Meadows said he would return “most of the folder” to the Justice Department.

Solomon has denounced the FBI investigation as the “criminalization of a records dispute.”

Following the FBI's Aug. 8 Mar-a-Lago raid, the Justice Department said hundreds of documents marked classified, including many marked “ top secret,” were kept in insecure locations on the property. Trump after he left office.