“You don’t run a Constitutional republic on secret files,” added legal analyst Margot Cleveland.
A current government source said the prohibited access designation is “literally designed to hide files from Congress and from the FBI itself. It’s really frigging bad.”
Off-books surveillance and “disruption” of political figures in the Arctic Frost and Trump-Russia investigations comprise part of the find, but the files extend at least as far back as 1999, across Democratic and Republican Party presidencies, involving as many as a thousand distinct case numbers. There are no rules for passing access to the system from one administration to the next. Instead, operation of prohibited access files is described as an oral tradition passed down among senior FBI officials, independent of agents below and political appointees above in Congress and even the White House.
Here’s how the files came to light: