FBI Director Kash Patel has submitted a large batch of declassified documents to Congress regarding the bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which focused on unproven allegations of collusion between Donald Trump and Russia. These nearly 700 pages, titled the Crossfire Hurricane Redacted Binder and dated April 9, 2025, were also exclusively obtained by Just the News. This move follows a March executive order by Trump, aimed at completing the declassification process for records related to the investigation. Trump had previously attempted to declassify these documents during his last days in office in January 2021, but his efforts were blocked by his own Justice Department at the time.
Since then, the Biden administration’s DOJ and FBI, led by former Attorney General Merrick Garland and former FBI Director Christopher Wray, continued to withhold the documents, citing classification concerns. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation, launched in 2016, targeted Trump during his campaign and presidency based on unverified claims of Russian collusion. Critics have long described the investigation as a politically motivated effort by elements within the intelligence and law enforcement communities to undermine Trump.
Trump’s March 2025 order, titled Immediate Declassification of Materials Related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, specifically referenced his earlier attempt to release the materials on January 19, 2021. In that earlier memo, Trump stated his intention to declassify the documents as fully as possible. However, the FBI had insisted on redacting certain sensitive passages. Trump agreed to those redactions and instructed the DOJ to release the rest, but the final step was never taken due to resistance from DOJ officials after he left office.
On the morning of January 20, 2021, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows sent a memo reinforcing that the DOJ was required to publish the binder, pending a Privacy Act review. Yet the records were not released under Garland’s DOJ or Wray’s FBI, despite Trump’s directive.
The broader investigation into Trump-Russia ties yielded no evidence of criminal collusion, according to a two-year probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Additionally, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz criticized the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier, which played a key role in the surveillance of former Trump aide Carter Page. This dossier, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, was commissioned by Fusion GPS, a firm hired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign through lawyer Marc Elias of Perkins Coie.
Further discrediting the investigation, Special Counsel John Durham concluded that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies had no concrete evidence of collusion in their files. Durham emphasized that the FBI failed to validate any of the key claims from the Steele dossier throughout the entire investigation. Despite these findings, some prominent Democrats, including Senator Adam Schiff, continued to promote the collusion narrative in the media.
