After a mysterious agreement in the White House today for the FBI to perhaps reveal top secret information about the ongoing Russia probe to House Republicans demanding it, Donald Trump "lawyer" Rudy Giuliani isn't even pretending that those documents won't be ending up in his own hands.
Check out what he's telling reporters about the documents the House will be allowed to see:
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said the documents requested by Trump will "indicate what the informant found." He also said the memos "should be made available to us on a confidential basis," he added. "We should be at least allowed to read them so we know this exculpatory evidence is being preserved.” It's unclear if there were any arrangements made for the White House to view the documents.
So Rudy's pretty clear that he expects the document request to reveal what the alleged informant "found", when he made contact with several Trump campaign aides that counterintelligence officials had discovered to have suspicious contacts with Kremlin-tied persons during the Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election on Trump's behalf.
But it's also clear that he expects "we", meaning Rudy Giuliani and the rest of Trump’s defense team, will be somehow getting their own look at the classified documents that, at least according to all prior information, would be provided only to House investigators.
Giuliani predicted the Justice Department would place redactions on some parts of the material.
“But as long as they turn over the vast majority of it it gives you a real sense” of what the FBI was doing. “The question is what are the justifications for it? Did the justifications continue? Did they pick up anything valuable? That’s the most important thing to do. We think they didn’t.”
It would be unheard of for a White House to be presented with evidence from an ongoing investigation into their own members: Unless Rosenstein and the FBI have completely capitulated to that seemingly illegal order, Rudy seems to believe that Rep. Devin Nunes and his allied House Republicans getting that classified information will naturally result in Rudy Giuliani and the rest of Trump’s legal team being given the details of what’s in those documents. How very informative.
Getting “a real sense” of what the FBI was doing, and whether they “picked up anything valuable”, would certainly be invaluable information to any in the Russia investigation looking to cover their tracks. Knowing what, exactly, prosecutors have been able to find found out gives both foreign actors and Trump's top campaign advisers, both indicted and not, a clearer picture of what they might have to admit to and what evidence might still be worth destroying. It's not often that a criminal enterprise or a foreign intelligence operation gets a front-row seat to view the secret evidence investigators have assembled against them, but none of those prior defendants had a sitting president, a House Speaker, and a Senate Majority Leader all working in concert to provide it.