Earlier this month, President Donald Trump declassified a GOP-written memo detailing the handling of FISA warrants for a former Trump campaign adviser. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Trump declassification of GOP memo could lead to cascade of disclosures The president's move creates a 'new frontier' for pending cases, a federal judge says.

The legal waves created by President Donald Trump’s decision to declassify a Republican memo suggesting FBI wrongdoing continued to crash ashore on Thursday, with a federal judge saying the president’s move had undermined government arguments that it should be able to keep mum about its ongoing investigations.

During a hearing on a bid by BuzzFeed to get more information about how a so-called dossier compiled by a former British spy was handled, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta grew frustrated with a Justice Department lawyer who argued that Trump’s declassification order did not alter the contours of the legal dispute.


Mehta said the government would normally be entitled to deference in asserting the need to keep its investigative work under wraps, but perhaps no longer with respect to the dossier.

“This isn’t the ordinary case,” Mehta told a Justice Department lawyer, Anjali Motgi. “I don’t know of any time the president has declassified the fact of a counterintelligence investigation. That’s going to be a hard sell given what the president has done. … This is a new frontier and it has an impact.”

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Earlier this month, Trump declassified the four-page memo prepared by aides to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee chairman, detailing the handling of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants for a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. The memo indicated that the applications for the warrants relied on information from the dossier, a compilation of intelligence reports prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele with funding from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

While Motgi sought to stress that a letter from White House counsel Don McGahn accompanying the Nunes memo indicated that the executive branch wasn’t endorsing the memo’s contents, Mehta wasn’t buying that.

“You think the White House would have let a factually inaccurate memo go out to the public?” the judge asked skeptically. “Are you telling me that the Department of Justice is at odds with the president of the United States about the factual accuracy of the Nunes memo?”

BuzzFeed posted a version of the dossier online in January 2017. The following month, a Russian tech entrepreneur, Aleksej Gubarev, sued the online news outlet for libel, saying that references to him and his companies in the document were untrue and had damaged his reputation.

As part of of its defense to the libel suit, BuzzFeed is seeking to force the U.S. government to answer certain questions about its handling of the dossier, including when top officials like President Barack Obama were briefed on its contents. Establishing how the dossier was being investigated might bolster the news outlet’s argument that publishing the dossier amounted to a “fair report” on ongoing government action.

Regardless of how Mehta rules on the issue before him, Trump’s declassification of the Nunes memo is already something of a gift to BuzzFeed.

An attorney for Buzzfeed, Nathan Siegel, said the website never tried to demand confirmation of the use of the dossier in the Page surveillance application because such facts are normally so closely held by the government.

“I never would have believed we’d ever get it,” Siegel said. “We didn’t even think we should ask for it.”

Mehta chimed in to add that he never would have thought it would be declassified either.

In light of Trump’s declassification, BuzzFeed has further narrowed its request and is now seeking confirmation of two basic facts: whether the pages of the dossier that mention Gubarev were in the government’s possession when they were published on Jan. 10, 2017, and whether Obama was briefed on the contents of the dossier early that month.

Motgi insisted that the fact that the FBI or another agency had those pages of the dossier wouldn’t prove anything significant related to the libel suit BuzzFeed is facing, because it wouldn’t necessarily show that information was being investigated.

“Mere possession of a document doesn’t constitute an official government proceeding,” she said.

“Aren’t you looking at this way too narrowly?” the judge replied.

At another point, Mehta, an Obama appointee, warned the government attorney: “You may want to be careful about what you’re going to say.”

Mehta didn’t issue any immediate ruling but said he was considering requiring the government to prepare a brief affidavit confirming whether the Gubarev-related pages of the dossier were in official hands on Jan. 10 of last year. However, the judge said he’d first receive another secret filing from the government about the impact such a disclosure would have on the ongoing investigation.

There are several Freedom of Information Act cases pending that could also be affected by Trump’s declassification move, although Siegel argued on Thursday that BuzzFeed should have more leverage in the defense of its suit than would members of the general public bringing FOIA cases.

In one of those FOIA cases on Wednesday, government lawyers notified the court that the president’s declassification actions forced them to withdraw a refuse-to-confirm-or-deny response issued on requests that USA Today reporter Brad Heath and the pro-transparency James Madison Project made for surveillance warrants on Trump associates.

Justice Department attorneys said they needed time to figure out the precise impact of Trump’s actions. They also alluded to the fact that the president is considering declassifying some version of a rebuttal memo prepared by House Intelligence Committee Democrats, possibly injecting more information into the public domain and further complicating pending litigation.

“Given recent events, and the possibility of additional declassifications by the president,” the lawyers wrote, “the government is unable at this time to propose a timetable to conduct this review.”

