On January 19, 2021, as one of the last acts of his first term, President Trump declassified a binder filled with hundreds of pages of FBI documents showing how the FBI spied on the Trump campaign and misled courts and Congress.  It was completely within the president's authority to do so, yet those documents, which would have laid to rest the Russia Hoax smear against Trump, never saw the light of day.  Now, Just The News has revealed that the Justice Department deliberately buried the documents, preventing Trump's declassification order from going into effect.

Just The News describes the material that Trump declassified:

The declassified documents included transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

In the end, multiple investigations found there was no such collusion and that the FBI violated rules and misled the FISA court in an effort to keep the probe going.

Significantly, the president is the end of the line for whether material is classified or not.  If he says it's not, then it isn't.  With that declassification order in place, Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, sent a message to the Department of Justice asking the DOJ to release the documents as expeditiously as possible:

"I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice (including all that appear to have a potential to raise privacy concerns) with the instruction that the Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied," Meadows wrote in the memo.

As Meadows's memo makes clear, the DOJ did not have the authority to refuse to release the documents.  Its authority was limited to redacting that material that would improperly violate specific individuals' privacy.  Instead, the DOJ did nothing at all.

Image: Department of (In)Justice headquarters by Coolcaesar.  CC BY-SA 3.0.

Just The News discovered this deliberate inaction when it went to the National Archives seeking the binder in question.  Instead, it learned from the National Archives that the binder never arrived, remaining instead in the DOJ's hands.

When Just The News interviewed Meadows, he said he wasn't surprised at all because the administrative state — which was supposed to report to the president — instead constantly thwarted him:

What would happen is he would have a directive, and then we would see, as people were leaving the Oval Office, you know, they were nodding compliance in the Oval Office, and the minute they go out, they said, "Well, we're not going to do that" or "We're going to find all the reasons not to do it." So I found that very often while I served as chief of staff, but also found that as a member of Congress, that many times we would go in and the president was all in on a transparency issue, only to find that many, whether they be at a particular agency or the Pentagon, they started pushing back.

In other words, presidents come and go, but the Swamp is forever — and it will report only to Democrat administrations.

There are myriad problems with this, chief among them the fact that the administrative state is an unconstitutional entity.  Were it to exist solely as a collection of functionaries carrying out explicit orders from the White House, that would be one thing.  An executive must have employees to carry out his orders (and his orders, of course, are to implement Congress's legislation).

However, we have an administrative state that has become entirely independent.  It writes laws; carries out those laws; acts as judge, jury, and executioner when it contends someone has broken those laws; and answers to no one unless it wants to.

Whoever the next Republican president is, whether Trump or someone else (DeSantis?), he is going to have to take the equivalent of a blowtorch to the administrative state.  This unconstitutional bureaucracy cannot be allowed to continue because it and its members clearly exist only to serve themselves.

This is statism in its purest form, and this entity views citizens as widgets whose only purpose is to feed it.  Think of the Plant in Little Shop of Horrors ("Feed me, Seymour,") and you understand perfectly how a totalitarian state views you.