“Trump could be setting the stage for the same kind of manufactured October surprise designed to help boost his standing and undermine Mueller,” said Jennifer Palmieri, former communications director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. | Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo Elections Democrats fear Trump ‘October Surprise’ document dump Democrats worry that Trump and his allies are teeing up a series of document releases meant to gin up GOP voters before the midterms.

Democratic operatives are growing anxious that Republicans working to undermine the FBI’s Russia probe are teeing up a series of document dumps meant to gin up GOP voters ahead of the midterm elections.

After weeks of hand-wringing, President Donald Trump on Monday ordered the declassification of a slew of documents related to the FBI’s long-running investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential connections to Russia. The move came on the heels of top House Republicans revealing that they may also release documents related to their probes into Trump-Russia ties, as well as anti-Trump bias at the FBI and Justice Department.


The White House and GOP leaders have cited “transparency” as their motive, and Trump has suggested the documents will show anti-Trump bias in the FBI led the bureau to supercharge its 2016 Russia probe based on flimsy evidence.

But Democrats see a more sinister plan: to taint special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing Russia probe, while simultaneously motivating Trump’s political base on the precipice of an election in which Democrats are favored to make gains. To Democrats, the situation has eerie similarities to 2016, when WikiLeaks’ slow-drip daily release of internal Clinton campaign emails hobbled Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and offered regular fodder for Republicans.

“Oh, God,” said Jennifer Palmieri, former communications director for Clinton’s campaign. “Trump could be setting the stage for the same kind of manufactured October surprise designed to help boost his standing and undermine Mueller.”

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Taken together, the soon-to-be-released documents — ranging from a highly classified application to surveil a Trump campaign aide, to transcripts of interviews with Trump’s campaign staffers, to former FBI Director James Comey’s text messages about the Russia probe — are likely to feed theories that the Russia investigation was launched on false pretenses, even if many find few revealing details in the newly public pages. And if the document releases are spread out over the weeks leading up to the election, they threaten to hijack several news cycles and give the president plenty to tweet about.

“If you look at what happened during the WikiLeaks release — it was such a mass of information in such a short period of time — reporters, our campaign, voters had a really hard time trying to sift through it,” said Zac Petkanas, a Democratic strategist who also worked on the Clinton campaign. “Just by virtue of the fact that information was out there that wasn’t supposed to be out there, it led to the inference that there was something nefarious or icky or unethical, even if the actual information itself was largely innocuous.”

Republicans behind the upcoming document releases have indicated that part of their motivation is to get information into the public domain before Election Day.

“It’s key to this election,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who is planning to release the transcripts of witness testimony from his panel’s now defunct probe into Russian election meddling, during a speech last week.

“It’s not going to be just about economic growth and running on the economy,” he said about the upcoming election. “It’s also going be about what the other side did to play dirty — to dirty up a campaign — but not do it through campaign tactics, but do it by corrupting the FBI and the DOJ. That is important for the American people to know and we have to deliver that message going into October.”

“I think you're going to be frightened by what you see,” Nunes added.

The fight to declassify Russia probe documents is a long-running cause for Trump and his GOP allies in Congress.

Trump and lawmakers like Nunes have concluded that the FBI’s Russia probe was launched by biased investigators looking to disparage Trump. They say investigators tapped the bureau’s most sensitive tools — like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act spying program, which allows the government to monitor Americans it suspects are working as foreign agents — to snoop on Trump’s campaign for political dirt. In particular, they argue that agents justified their actions using unverified claims about Trump’s relationship with Russia in the dossier compiled by a former British spy that was indirectly financed by the Clinton campaign.

Backers of the probe point out that its existence remained secret throughout the 2016 campaign — anti-Trump agents surely would’ve leaked it, they argue. And many of the elements that led to its launch predated the so-called Steele Dossier, they note, showing that authorities had much more evidence beyond the sometimes salacious document.

But Trump has inserted himself into the ongoing process repeatedly, both through his rhetoric and his decisions to declassify sensitive documents over the objections of law enforcement leaders. In addition to repeatedly deriding the investigation as a “witch hunt” and calling FBI bias a “cancer” that he’s attempting to root out, Trump also chose to release a controversial Republican memo in January meant to cast doubt on the validity of the Russia probe.

Now, Trump has ordered the declassification of 20 pages of a FISA warrant application to surveil another campaign aide, Carter Page, who was under scrutiny for two 2016 trips to Russia. Separately, he has directed officials to release the unredacted text messages sent by Comey and other senior FBI officials about the probe.

Finally, Trump has asked law enforcement leaders to declassify documents related to Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice Department official who helped steer pieces of the Steele Dossier to the FBI and personally knows Christopher Steele, the document’s author.

It's unclear when those documents will be released.

Trump’s directive was in line with requests from Nunes and other congressional Republicans. And it also came just days after Nunes announced his own upcoming document dump. The Intelligence Committee head said he would release hundreds — perhaps thousands — of pages from interviews the panel conducted.

The closely linked timing of the Nunes and Trump announcements raised eyebrows among Democrats, as they had spent months pleading with Nunes to release the very same transcripts.

“Why the sudden about-face to be immediately followed by the White House to order its own release?” Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, wondered recently on MSNBC.

Two other GOP-led House committees, Judiciary and Oversight, are also planning to release findings from their own investigation of anti-Trump bias within the FBI and Justice Department. But the timing of their release is less certain because witness interviews are ongoing. It’s also unclear whether they’ll issue a comprehensive report or a summary of their conclusions. Still, the panel has interviewed Ohr and other top Justice Department and FBI figures central to Republicans’ concerns about the Russia probe’s origins.

Some Democrats caution against reading too much into the timing of these releases.

“Given Donald Trump’s temperament, it’s impossible to know if it’s strategic or impulsive,” said Robby Mook, Clinton’s former campaign manager.

And there’s recent evidence that in a battle of public opinion, Mueller would best Trump. Despite the president’s near-daily attacks on the probe, polls suggest voters think Mueller has handled the probe well, although the results skew heavily along partisan lines.

Still, if Trump and his allies successfully flood the zone with new information in the weeks before an election, it could create a din that rings in voters ears as they enter the voting booth, Democrats warn.

Petkanas noted that lawmakers and reporters have spent months trying to decipher previous dumps of similar documents. For instance, there was a back-and-forth over the meaning of some anti-Trump text messages between top FBI Russia probe investigator and Peter Strzok and bureau lawyer Lisa Page. In particular, one message described a “secret society” of FBI officials — a comment initially trumpeted by Trump’s GOP allies as evidence of a conspiracy, but later determined to be made in jest.

“The fact that they are doing this so close to the midterms, we don’t have a full week to sort out the secret societies from the actual things we need to worry about,” Petkanas said. “They are counting on that fact.”