Patel Sends Declassified Crossfire Hurricane Docs On Russiagate Scandal to Congress
FBI Director Kash Patel has submitted numerous pages of declassified documents to Congress pertaining to the bureau’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, which focused on unfounded claims of Trump-Russia collusion, following an executive order from President Donald Trump mandating their declassification.
Approximately 700 pages of these documents, titled the “Crossfire Hurricane Redacted Binder” and dated April 9, 2025, have been exclusively acquired by Just the News.
The action taken by Trump and Patel pertains to a March executive order intended to finalize the declassification of documents associated with the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation—an initiative that had been obstructed by Trump’s own Justice Department in January 2021 during the concluding days of his first administration.
This follows four years of opposition from the Biden administration’s Department of Justice and FBI, under former Attorney General Merrick Garland and ex-FBI Director Christopher Wray, who declined to disclose the papers.
The FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, initiated in 2016, aimed at then-candidate and then President Trump, was founded on unverified claims of conspiracy with the Russian government, implicating 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Subsequently, it faced extensive criticism as a politically motivated initiative by factions within the intelligence and law enforcement sectors aimed at subverting Trump’s government.
Trump’s March directive is entitled “Immediate Declassification of Materials Pertaining to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.” He alludes to his prior, futile endeavor to declassify the identical information on his last complete day in office during his initial tenure.
“I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder,” Trump said Jan. 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.”
The 2021 memo from Trump said he had “determined that the materials should be declassified to the maximum extent possible.” However, the FBI under Wray said in mid-January 2021 that the agency had “identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure.”
Trump said at the time he would “accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI” and ordered the rest of the documents to be declassified and made available by the Justice Department.
Trump’s final declassification request was blocked by the Justice Department after he left the White House, preventing that from happening.
A memo from then–White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, delivered on the morning of January 20, 2021, asserted that the Justice Department “must” release the binder of declassified documents related to the flawed Trump–Russia investigation, pending a Privacy Act review.
However, the DOJ under Garland and the FBI under Wray never released the records, despite Trump’s declassification order and Meadows’ final-hour directive.
A two-year investigation by Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller “did not establish” any criminal collusion between Trump and Russia. Additionally, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz identified major flaws in the FBI’s investigation, including its reliance on a dossier he described as playing a “central and essential” role in the FBI’s politically charged surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The dossier was compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS.
In turn, Fusion had been retained by Clinton’s 2016 campaign through then-Perkins Coie attorney Marc Elias.
A subsequent report by a new Justice Department 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 said the “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.”
