FBI Director Kash Patel has provided Congress with hundreds of pages of declassified documents from the bureau’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, which focused on unfounded claims of collusion between Trump and Russia. This action follows an executive order from President Donald Trump that mandated the declassification of these records.
Additionally, nearly 700 pages of these documents, referred to as the “Crossfire Hurricane Redacted Binder” and dated April 9, 2025, have been exclusively acquired by Just the News.
This initiative by Trump and Patel is linked to a March executive order aimed at finalizing the declassification of records associated with the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation—an effort that had been obstructed by Trump’s own Justice Department in January 2021 during the concluding days of his first term.
The release also follows four years of opposition from the Biden administration’s DOJ and FBI, under the leadership of former Attorney General Merrick Garland and ex-FBI Director Christopher Wray, who had consistently denied access to the documents.
The FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which targeted then-candidate and later President Trump in 2016 and beyond, was initiated based on unverified allegations of collusion with the Russian government. It has since faced significant criticism as a politically motivated endeavor by certain factions within the intelligence and law enforcement communities aimed at undermining Trump’s presidency.
Trump’s March order, titled “Immediate Declassification of Materials Related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” references his previous, unsuccessful attempt to declassify the same materials on his last full day in office during his first term. In announcing the order, he stated, “I have determined that all of the materials referenced in the Presidential Memorandum of January 19, 2021 … are no longer classified.” This January 2021 order mentioned a binder of materials related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which he claimed was provided to the White House by the Justice Department at his request.
On January 19, 2021, Trump stated, “I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review, and I have instructed the Attorney General to carry out the redactions suggested in the FBI’s submission from January 17 and return an appropriately redacted copy to the White House.” In his 2021 memo, Trump indicated that he had “determined that the materials should be declassified to the maximum extent possible.” However, the FBI, led by Wray, noted in mid-January 2021 that it had “identified the passages that it deemed most critical to withhold from public disclosure.”
At that time, Trump expressed his willingness to “accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI” and directed the Justice Department to declassify the remaining documents for public access.
After Trump departed from the White House, the Justice Department blocked his final declassification request, preventing its execution.
A memo from Mark Meadows, who was the White House Chief of Staff at the time, was delivered on the morning of January 20, 2021, stating that the Justice Department “must” release the binder of declassified documents related to the flawed Trump–Russia investigation, contingent upon a Privacy Act review.
Nevertheless, the DOJ under Garland and the FBI under Wray did not release the records, despite Trump’s declassification order and Meadows’ last-minute directive.
A two-year investigation conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller from the Justice Department “did not establish” any criminal collusion between Trump and Russia. Furthermore, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz identified significant shortcomings in the FBI’s investigation, including its dependence on a dossier that he described as playing a “central and essential” role in the FBI’s politically motivated surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The dossier was assembled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, who was engaged by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS, in turn, was hired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign through Marc Elias, an attorney with Perkins Coie.
A later investigation conducted by John Durham, a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, determined 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 further stated that the “FBI overlooked the fact that at no point before, during, or after Crossfire Hurricane were investigators able to substantiate any significant claims made in the Steele dossier.”
Despite this, prominent Democrats, including current Senator Adam Schiff of California, continued to propagate these unfounded allegations in the media.
