Many of the documents “contain sources and methods that we can’t make public for a number of reasons, including to jeopardize any investigation that’s going there,” DNI John Ratcliffe told the Washington Examiner.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Thursday said that he has given thousands of documents to U.S. Attorney John Durham, but Ratcliffe noted that much of the material includes information that cannot be publicly released.
Durham was secretly appointed by Attorney General William Barr in October as special counsel to investigate federal law enforcement abuses in pursuing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative spun from a Democrat opposition research effort during the 2016 campaign.
“Between my predecessor Richard Grenell in an acting capacity and myself, we have declassified most of the intelligence community documents that would be suitable for the public to see, that wouldn’t jeopardize sources and methods,” Ratcliffe told the Washington Examiner. “There are others, many many documents — I think it’s been out there that I’ve provided literally thousands of documents to John Durham, but many of those do contain sources and methods that we can’t make public for a number of reasons, including to jeopardize any investigation that’s going there. So I think the level of cooperation — I’ve given them everything that they’ve asked for.”
Ratcliffe said that wrongdoing definitely occurred and Americans are entitled to “an accounting.”
“There was an abuse of power and of legal authorities, and it’s not a question about whether those things took place — they did,” Ratcliffe said. “I mean, there’s an FBI lawyer who is going to jail for counterfeiting evidence before the FISA court. And that after all of the Obama-Biden senior national security officials said the idea of illegal spying and abuse at the FISA court is a bunch of nonsense, and now, they’re sprinting the opposite direction.
“I mean, literally, every one of them — Comey, McCabe, Yates — they’ve all said, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re shocked, and had we only known.’ And so, again, the American people deserve an accounting, and I’ve certainly provided a lot of information to the now-special counsel to provide that accounting, and I’m counting, like all Americans, on him to talk about a lot of the things that I know that I can’t talk about.”