John Solomon, CEO and editor-in-chief of Just the News, is calling for the creation of a “transparency czar” within the Trump administration to oversee the public release of documents, including the recently declassified FBI files relating to Crossfire Hurricane.
Last month, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum titled “Immediate Declassification of Materials Related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” declassifying materials related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, which was launched to uncover whether or not the 2016 Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
Solomon, who recently obtained and published the declassified documents at Just the News, noted how Trump ordered the declassification of the same documents near the end of his first term; however, the FBI withheld the documents from being released throughout the Biden administration.
“The first time the president declassified these very documents was in January 2021, just before he left office after his first term. On the last day when they were about to be released to me and other reporters across the country, the FBI swooped in, scooped up the documents and kept them from the American public for four years,” Solomon explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“The government, the FBI, the Justice Department kept the documents away from us. The president signed a second order, declassifying them. Kash Patel complied with that order, unlike the original FBI, and he sent the documents up to Capitol Hill. Last week, we got our own set from sources and we’ve been writing about them and also we’ve published all of them so all the American public can enjoy and read them,” Solomon added.
Solomon further said Just the News will be pushing for the release of additional documents relating to Crossfire Hurricane, including the investigation’s fourth Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant.
“There are still a lot of documents that have not been released that we believe should be released. Among them is a more unredacted version of the final FISA warrant. There were four FISA warrants that targeted and allowed the government to spy on Trump and his campaign and his administration. The fourth one, we believe, has some more damning information in it,” Solomon said.
“So there are a lot of documents that we believe should be released and we’ll keep fighting for them over the next few weeks,” Solomon added.
Moving forward, Solomon recommended the creation of a “transparency czar” to oversee the release of declassified materials, noting how the mentality of bureaucrats at agencies, including the FBI of those of “custodians of the record” who have displayed a tendency to keep such materials “as though they own them.”
“I think at the end of the day, the mentality of those who are custodians of the record…are to keep the documents as though they own them, that they’re their documents, they’re not the public documents. You can’t escape that mindset by allowing the agencies who possess them to continue to control them. I think there’s a greater and significant opportunity for everybody to maybe create a czar. We’ve got a czar for many different things, including a DOGE czar. Maybe it’s time to have a czar for transparency. An extreme transparency czar,” Solomon explained.
“That might take the decisions out of the hands of the custodians of the documents, whose natural tendencies are to hide them from the public. Put them in the hands of someone who’s truly committed to public disclosure, public transparency. I think that may be a much better concept,” Solomon added.
Listen to Hour 2 of the Michael Patrick Leahy Show now. @jsolomonReports John Solomon joins me to talk about the Crossfire Hurricane Russiagate hoax and what new unclassified documents show! https://t.co/gyryQEZ02M
— MichaelPatrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) April 14, 2025
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
