Judge: Trump's release of dossier memos opens door to disclosures from FBI
By JOSH GERSTEIN 08/16/2018 09:40 PM EDT
President Donald Trump’s decision to declassify competing congressional memos about the validity of the so-called Steele dossier means the FBI has lost its authority to rebuff Freedom of Information Act requests about the bureau’s efforts to verify the report’s intelligence linking Trump to Russia during the 2016 campaign, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.
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The decision came on an FOIA lawsuit filed last year by this reporter and a pro-transparency group, the James Madison Project.
“This ruling represents another incremental step in revealing just how much the FBI has been able to verify or discredit the rather personal allegations contained in that synopsis derived from the Steele dossier,” said Brad Moss, a lawyer pressing the lawsuit. “It will be rather ironic if the president’s peripheral actions that resulted in this ruling wind up disclosing that the FBI has been able to corroborate any of the ‘salacious’ allegations.”
A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the decision.
The ruling will not take immediate effect, because the case was on appeal to the D.C. Circuit when Trump approved release of the House memos. The appeals court is now likely to remand the case to Mehta to determine whether the FBI has other grounds to withhold records about verifying the dossier.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2018/08/16/trump-dossier-fbi-disclosures-782237
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