In the final days of his chaotic administration, Donald Trump reportedly told White House staff that he needed to protect documents that he believed would expose the Russia investigation as a hoax and reveal a “Deep State” conspiracy against him, The Rolling Stone reports.
According to the publication, “The documents related to the federal investigation into Russian election meddling and alleged collusion with Trump’s campaign. At the end of his presidency, Trump and his team pushed to declassify these so-called ‘Russiagate’ documents, believing they would expose a ‘Deep State’ plot against him.”
Citing “a person with direct knowledge of the situation and another source briefed on the matter,” reporters Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng wrote that “Trump told several people working in and outside the White House that he was concerned Joe Biden’s incoming administration — or the ‘Deep State’ — would supposedly ‘shred,’ bury, or destroy ‘the evidence’ that Trump was somehow wronged.”
The revelation comes as the FBI has launched a criminal investigation into the former president’s handling of highly classified information that was seized by federal agents during a search at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
According to the Justice Department, some of those documents contain intelligence about nuclear capabilities of a foreign power and clandestine human sources who gather intelligence for the United States at great personal risk.
“Since the search, Trump has refused to say which classified government papers and top-secret documents he had at Mar-a-Lago and what the FBI had seized. (Trump considers the documents ‘mine’ and has directed his lawyers to make that widely-panned argument in court.) The feds have publicly released little about the search and its results,” said the report.”
“It’s unclear if any of the materials in Trump’s document trove are related to Russia or the election interference investigation. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment,” the report concluded.
Read the full report at The Rolling Stone.
