Patel Hands Over FBI Trump-Russia Probe Docs to Congress
Kash Patel, former FBI Director of National Intelligence, has provided Congress with hundreds of pages of declassified documents tied to the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” probe—an investigation that was built around disproven claims of collusion between Donald Trump and Russia. The release follows an executive order from former President Donald Trump instructing that these materials be made public.
Just the News has obtained close to 700 pages of these documents, labeled the “Crossfire Hurricane Redacted Binder” and marked with the date April 9, 2025, as an exclusive.
This action stems from Trump’s March executive order, which aimed to complete the release of records linked to the FBI’s investigation into alleged ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. That initial declassification effort had been stalled in January 2021 by Trump’s own Justice Department during the closing days of his first presidency.
The release also follows years of pushback from the Justice Department and FBI under President Joe Biden, with former Attorney General Merrick Garland and ex-FBI Director Christopher Wray resisting efforts to unseal the documents.
Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s controversial investigation that began in 2016 and targeted both candidate and later President Trump, was launched based on unverified allegations of Russian collusion. The probe also involved figures from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
In the years since, many within the intelligence and law enforcement communities have harshly criticized the investigation as a politically driven attempt to damage Trump’s presidency.
Trump’s March directive, titled “Immediate Declassification of Materials Related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” refers back to his earlier—but unsuccessful—attempt to declassify the same materials on January 19, 2021, his last full day in office.
“I have determined that all of the materials referenced in the Presidential Memorandum of January 19, 2021 … are no longer classified,” Trump said in announcing the order.
Back in January 2021, Trump had cited a binder of Crossfire Hurricane-related documents that the Justice Department had delivered to the White House on December 30, 2020.
“I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder,” Trump said on January 19, 2021. “This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.”
In that memo, Trump also stated that the documents should be declassified “to the maximum extent possible.” The FBI under Wray responded by identifying which parts it believed needed to stay classified.
Trump agreed to accept those redactions and ordered that the rest of the materials be made public by the Justice Department. However, after he left office, the DOJ prevented that order from being carried out.
A memo from then–White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on the morning of January 20, 2021, insisted the DOJ “must” release the binder, pending a Privacy Act review. Despite this directive, the DOJ and FBI never disclosed the documents.
The Crossfire Hurricane investigation had already been undermined by several official findings. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lengthy probe “did not establish” that Trump or his campaign had engaged in criminal collusion with Russia. Moreover, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz flagged serious problems with the FBI’s conduct, especially the heavy reliance on a now-discredited dossier used to justify surveillance of former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. Horowitz said the dossier played a “central and essential” role in obtaining surveillance warrants.
The dossier had been compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, working on behalf of Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm. Fusion GPS was hired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign through attorney Marc Elias of the Perkins Coie law firm.
In a more recent report, Special Counsel John Durham concluded that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
Durham also pointed out that “FBI ignored the fact that at no time before, during, or after Crossfire Hurricane were investigators able to corroborate a single substantive allegation in the Steele dossier reporting.”