Bugs Marlowe
In June of this year, seven weeks before the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in search of classified materials, former Defense Department appointee and outspoken Trump loyalist Kash Patel vowed to retrieve classified documents from the National Archives and publish them on his website.
Trump had just issued a letter instructing the National Archives to grant Patel and conservative journalist John Solomon access to nonpublic administration records, according to reporting at the time.
Patel, who under Trump had been the chief of staff for the acting defense secretary, claimed in a string of interviews that Trump had declassified a trove of “Russiagate documents” in the final days of his administration. But Patel claimed Trump’s White House counsel had blocked the release of those documents, and instead had them delivered to the National Archives.
“I’ve never told anyone this because it just happened,” Patel said in an interview on a pro-Trump podcast on June 22. “I’m going to identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified at the National Archives, and we’re going to start putting that information out next week.”
Patel did not provide a clear explanation of how he would legally or practically obtain the documents.
“White House counsel and company disobeyed a presidential order and implemented federal governmental bureaucracy on the way out to basically send the stash to the National Archives, and now that’s where it’s at,” Patel said in a subsequent interview on June 23 on a different pro-Trump internet show.
R&I – FS