#FOIAFriday SCOOP: DOJ released a doc to me in response to a 5 year old #FOIA request. It's a doc I didn't specifically ask for. It's a transcript of an off the record discussion Obama had with reporters about Trump, et al, 3 days before he left office
Obama told reporters he was not too worried abt 4 yrs of Trump
“Take on some water, but we can kind of bail fast enough to be okay. 8 years would be a problem. I would be concerned about a sustained period in which some of these norms have broken down and started to corrode”
Obama told reporters during this January 17, 2017 discussion that they should pay particularly close attn to DOJ
Obama said in these previously unpublished remarks that he didn’t believe Trump was particularly interested in starting any wars other than “bombing the heck out of terrorists."
This is what Obama thought about Trump's view of foreign policy
Obama said at the time that the Republican Party "is ideologically completely incoherent.”
“You don’t know what they stand for,” he said.
He went on
For all of Trump’s harsh criticisms about Obama, the 44th president said Trump’s public persona was radically different than in his private interactions.
This is what he said.
This was a nearly 90 minute off the record discussion Obama had with reporters. He touched on a wide range of topics, including his communtation of @xychelsea's prison sentence and @Snowden's leaks.
But it was Obama’s comments about the GOP and Trump that seem almost prescient
Obama said his No. 1 concern about the then incoming Trump administration was the potential politicization of law enforcement
There are a bunch of other revealing tidbits in this transcript such as Obama expressing his frustration with "the Greenwalds of the world" and his comments about Coney and the FBI
Obama had some advice for reporters covering Trump right before he left office
that should read *Comey*
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NEW FOIA Files🧵: The FBI just sent me a set of docs that’s directly related to Trump’s hush money trial. They're business records from First Republic Bank, where Trump’s former atty Michael Cohen opened an account to pay off adult film star Stormy Daniels.
The details around the bank activity have been widely reported, but many of the underlying financial documents haven’t surfaced. And since cameras aren’t allowed in the courtroom, the public largely hasn’t seen the evidence at the center of the trial
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How I got these documents is kind of a long story. Five years ago, I filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FBI. It was for all the interview summaries – or ‘302s’ as they’re known – from key witnesses questioned during the Mueller probe
Since Cohen was a witness, I’m now in possession of 25-pages of his supplemental interview material
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A little backstory on this week's FOIA Files newsletter 🧵
Not long after Russia launched airstrikes in Ukraine in 2022, I started seeing tweets that said some of Russia’s targets were labs where Ukraine had secretly been developing bio weapons w/the help of the US govt 1/
The allegations seemed to be an obvious attempt to justify the invasion. They garnered thousands of retweets. Soon Fox News was amplifying the claims.
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The stories had a huge impact. One poll in late March of that year found that more than a quarter of Americans believed the US-Ukraine bioweapons theory.
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NEW FOIA Files newsletter is out with a SCOOP based on 2500 pages of docunents about how a Defense Dept office struggled to fend off a "Russian lie" related to biolabs in Ukraine after the February 2022 invasion
The documents provide a rare behind-the-scenes look into an escalating disinformation war during a critical two-month period after the Ukraine invasion
It took me more than a year to liberate these records from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the division that was targeted by Russia's disinformation campaign
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One name that stands out prominently in the cache is Robert Pope, the director of DTRA’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program. Pope said he’d suspected that his agency would eventually wind up in Russia’s crosshairs.
SCOOP: 2nd edition of my weekly newsletter, FOIA Files, is out (SUBSCRIBE!), based on FBI docs related to the classified docs Trump took to MAL & how the Aug 2022 search roiled some of FBI's rank & file
The FBI employee sent that email to the FBI ombudsman shortly after the MAL search. “If he took documents, give him a call and ask for them back. Like ...Seriously? My own agency .... A bunch of democrat political hacks up top…I've lost just about all faith in our leadership”
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Another FBI employee was even harsher, characterizing the bureau as a “Banana Republic” and an “embarrassment,” and demanding answers to a series of questions.
Fighting for records continues to be painstaking, difficult work but my @business colleagues & I still managed to overcome the culture of secrecy & pry loose 1000s of pages of docs from state & federal agencies this year
The greatest hits
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The ultimate META FOIA: I FOIA'd Trump's FOIA to the IRS & then in Jan @laurapdavison & I landed this scoop: Trump used the FOIA to try and hinder IRS release of his tax returns
@laurapdavison Also in Jan, a FOIA lawsuit @business & I filed against NARA resulted in the first release docs related to the retrieval of 15 boxes of presidential records Trump stored at Mar-a-Lago.