In the waning hours of the administration, Trump ordered a host of documents, including the binder, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for mass declassification in a scheme to prove that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation into his 2016 campaign ties was a hoax.
Republican aides spent days scrubbing the binder, redacting the most sensitive details so that an abridged version could be released to the public, even against the behest of other top Trump administration officials who repeatedly attempted to block the former president from releasing its contents, according to the outlet.
A day before his term was set to end, Trump issued an order to preemptively declassify most of the binder’s contents well before it was ready and regardless of some of the redactions. Multiple copies of the redacted version had been created inside the White House, with plans to hand them off to Republicans and right-wing journalists. But that’s not what happened. Instead, White House lawyers scrambled, forcing an immediate retrieval of some documents that had already been sent off, and demanding that the documents be stripped down more.