(PresidentialInsider.com)- Last week, the Justice Department admitted that it would not make the deadline set by President Biden’s executive order to review and release the documents related to the FBI investigation into the 9/11 attacks.
Back in September, the president ordered the DOJ to review the FBI investigation documents and gave it six months to publicly release the declassified documents.
In a filing last week, the DOJ informed New York Judge Sarah Netburn that the FBI would release most of the required documents by the middle of March with more releases to follow through mid-April. The DOJ told the judge that the coordination with foreign governments and “ongoing interagency review” were the causes of the delay.
The Justice Department told the judge that the FBI was working on creating separate “production sets” of the documents by mid-April since the records contain redactions required by the Privacy Act.
So far, the FBI has released over 700 documents and more than 2,700 pages in accordance with President Biden’s executive order.
Families of those killed on 9/11 have been demanding more information from the DOJ on what the FBI discovered in its investigation and have for years contended that these documents will reveal a Saudi connection to the plot.
Saudi Arabia has long denied it had a role in the 9/11 attacks, despite fifteen of the 19 hijackers being Saudis.
The group representing the families and survivors of 9/11 sent President Biden a letter last Thursday urging him to address the 9/11 attacks in his discussions with Saudi Arabia on increasing oil output.
According to the 9/11 Commission report, no evidence of direct Saudi funding in the al Qaeda plot was found. However, the commission did not rule out the possibility that individual Saudi officials may have provided funding for the 9/11 terrorist attack.
The families of about 2,500 of those killed on 9/11, over 20,000 of the injured, along with businesses and various insurers have sued Saudi Arabia for billions of dollars in damages related to the 9/11 attack.
