Material from Russia investigation disappeared when Trump left office
Material from a folder containing top secret information related to the investigation into Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election disappeared in the final days of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, two people familiar with the matter said.
The disappearance of the material, known as the “Crossfire Hurricane” folder after the name the FBI gave to the investigation, irritated national security officials and raised concerns that sensitive information could be shared inappropriately, one of the people said .
The disappearance of the material was CNN reported this earlier Friday. The case was so concerning to officials that the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed on it last year, a U.S. official said.
The folder consists of a hodgepodge of materials related to the origins and early stages of the Russia investigation collected by Trump administration officials. They include copies of failed FBI applications for national security surveillance warrants to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser, as well as text messages between two FBI officials involved in the investigation, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page , which expressed their hostility toward Mr. Trump.
The contents of the material – a redacted version of which has since been made public under the Freedom of Information Act posted on the FBI website — is not considered particularly sensitive, the official said.
But the rough draft in the folder contained details that intelligence agencies believe could reveal secret sources and methods. (The publicly available version contains numerous parts marked as classified.)
It is not clear whether the missing material includes the entire original folder of material provided to the White House for Mr. Trump’s team to review and partially release before he leaves office.
Among other murky details, it is not known how many copies were made at the White House or how the government knows one set is missing.
The folder has been a source of recurring attention since January 2021, just before Trump left office. At the time, Mr. Trump’s aides prepared redactions for some of the material it contained because the president — who was obsessed with the Russia investigation and believed his political enemies had used it to damage his presidency — planned to release and make it public.
Officials made several copies of the redacted version, which some Trump aides planned to release publicly.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had a copy of the folder’s material given to at least one conservative writer, according to testimony and court filings.
But when Justice Department officials raised concerns that sharing some of the material would violate the Privacy Act, when the department was already being sued by Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page for making some of their writing public released, the copies were hastily retrieved. , according to two people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Trump was deeply focused on what was in the folder, a person close to him said. Even after leaving the White House, Trump still wanted to bring information from the folder to the public’s attention. During an April 2021 interview for a book about Trump’s presidency, he suggested that Mr. Meadows still had the material.
“I would let you watch it if you wanted to,” Trump said in the interview. “It’s a treasure trove.”
Mr. Trump did not elaborate on whether he himself had some of the material. But when a Trump aide present at the interview asked him, “Does Meadows have that?” Mr. Trump responded: “Meadows has them.”
“We pretty much won that battle,” Mr. Trump added, referring to questions about whether his 2016 campaign had worked with Russia. “There was no conspiracy. There was nothing. And I think maybe it was past its prime. It would be a fun book to look at.”
George J. Terwilliger III, a lawyer for Mr. Meadows, said the former chief of staff was not responsible for any missing materials. “Mark never took a copy of that folder home,” he said.
A person familiar with the matter said shortly after the court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 by FBI agents searching for classified documents that they found no Crossfire Hurricane material.
Adding to the confusion over the material and who possessed it, a series of Russian investigative documents that Mr. Trump believed he had declassified did not have their classification marks changed when they were given to the National Archives, according to a person. with expertise.
At the time, Mr. Trump was in a standoff with the archives over the piles of presidential material he took with him when he left the White House on January 20, 2021, and he resisted returning them. So Mr. Trump told his advisers that he would return those boxes in exchange for the Russia-related documents.
Aides never followed his suggestion.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, John Ratcliffe, then Trump’s director of national intelligence, released approximately 1,000 pages of intelligence material related to the Russia investigation, which Trump allies used to discredit the investigation.
In 2022, Mr. Trump created John Solomon, a conservative writer who had received the folder shortly before it was retrieved, one of its representatives at the National Archives. This allowed Mr. Solomon to see Trump White House records filed with the agency. He later filed a lawsuit against the government over the folder, seeking access to what he said were declassified documents from the folder that were denied to him by the archives.
a court filing he filed in August described the folder as being about 10 inches thick and containing about 2,700 pages. The publicly released version amounts to 585 pages; it is not clear what explains the discrepancy.
The filing stated that Mr. Solomon was allowed to browse a version of the folder at the White House on January 19, 2021. The contents included, it said, a 2017 FBI report on the interview with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier containing unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia; “task orders” related to a confidential FBI human source; “lightly redacted” copies of failed surveillance warrant applications; and text messages between FBI officials.
The filing said that Mr. Solomon or an aide returned to the White House that evening and was given a copy of the materials in the folder in a paper bag, and that a Justice Department envelope was separately delivered containing some of the documents. to his office.
But while Mr. Solomon’s office was scanning the larger set, the filing said, the White House requested the documents be returned so that certain private information could be removed. Mr Meadows promised Mr Solomon he would get the revised folder back, it said, but he never did.
When Mr. Solomon later tried to see the folder in the Trump White House archives at the National Archives, he said: the agency denied him access to a box containing 2,700 pages “with various types of classification and declassification marks” that it said it was required to treat as highly classified. The agency also told him that it did not have the declassified version of the folder that Mr. Solomon briefly had in his possession because the Justice Department still has it in its possession.