WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, appeared on “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo” to discuss his committee’s investigation into the Russia probe and corruption of the 2016 presidential transition, calling for John Ratcliffe to declassify information ahead of the election in the absence of an interim report.
Excerpts are below and video of the interview can be found here.
(5:31) “I think John Durham, if he’s not going to present indictments, Attorney General Barr has to make available to the American public what they’ve already found out, or at a minimum provide those documents to people like me, that these things are under subpoena. John Ratcliffe has to declassify this information so that we can make it public to the American public before the election. The political nature is if we don’t provide that information.”
(6:49) “Let me disagree a little bit with Chairman Graham when he said he’s very pleased with production out of the FBI – I am not. Let me just give you one example. Here is a document we got from the General Services Administration. You can see that it’s an email and everything is presented except for the very bottom: They redacted the mobile phone number of the person writing the email. Here is the exact same email we got from the FBI. You see something different here? Everything is redacted. … I had to finally subpoena the FBI. They are on their second extension. Everything is due by, I think, the 30th of September and that’s the kind of information we get – it’s non-information. We have to fight over redacting the same documents that we get from other agencies. So I am not happy at all with the document production we’ve gotten out of Director Wray and the FBI, not even close.
(8:31) “When we finally do get these classified sections unredacted, when they become declassified, if you look at what information you have and you have to ask yourself the question, ‘What national security interest was at stake here? Why was this ever redacted?’ The answer is almost always because it embarrassed the agency or it embarrassed a powerful person. That is not the reason to classify information. It’s certainly not the reason to keep the truth from the American public, and that’s all I’ve been trying to do is I’ve been trying to reveal the truth.”
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