Florida GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis asked Speaker of the House Paul Ryan on Tuesday to declassify all of the Department of Justice and FBI’s Trump dossier files, The Caller News Foundation has learned.
DeSantis, the chairman of the House Oversight subcommittee on National Security, formally asked Ryan in a letter to invoke Rule X in order to declassify all documents obtained by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Under House rules, the speaker of the House acts as an ex-officio member of any select committee, which includes the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Under Rule X, the speaker along with a majority vote by the committee can allow for the disclosure of “any information in its possession after a determination by the select committee that the public interest would be served by such disclosure.”
After five months of defying Congress, the Department of Justice and FBI agreed on Jan. 3 to provide the Intelligence Committee with all of its documents on the Trump dossier, an unverified document based on unnamed Russian sources about President Donald Trump. The documents are classified and barred from public review. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: HOUSE INTEL COMMITTEE HAS RECEIVED ALL DOCS ON TRUMP DOSSIER FROM DOJ, FBI)
Former MI-6 British spy Christopher Steele authored the 35-page document under a retainer by Fusion-GPS, a Washington, D.C.-based political opposition firm. Both the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the dossier in 2016.
California GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and other members of his committee gained full access to the documents Friday.
The documents also included possible Obama administration use of the dossier to justify surveillance of Trump transition officials.
“The American people deserve answers,” DeSantis said in a statement. “I am asking Speaker Ryan to ask, pursuant to House rules, Chairman Nunes to declassify any documents his committee may have related to the Steele dossier, as maintaining integrity in our nation’s law enforcement agencies is integral to our democracy.”
“The more we learn about the production of the discredited Steele dossier, the more it appears that a select group of FBI and Justice Department officials utilized what was effectively Hillary Clinton’s political opposition research document,” the congressmen wrote.
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