In the middle of an expansive piece on how screwed up the Trump Administration’s record-keeping was at the end of his single term in office, the New York Times drops a little nugget to show how petty and vindictive the Trump cabal is.
Some of the documents Donald Trump put a priority on declassifying before he left office were the FBI investigatory notes on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Most important to him, Trump wanted to declassify the text message between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, FBI agents who were having an affair and who exchanged text messages critical of Trump.
One problem: the FBI would not drop its objections to declassifying the notes; it argued that the notes contained highly sensitive material that could divulge collection sources and methods.
After the FBI handed him a redacted file that it felt protected US interests, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows developed a plan to hand the entire file to at least one unspecified conservative media personality to try to humiliate Strzok and Page.
Meadows reportedly abandoned the plan after being told releasing the information to the media could lead to lawsuits relating to the break of privacy laws against himself and other administration officials.