FBI Director Kash Patel has delivered hundreds of pages of declassified documents to Congress from the bureau’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, which centered on false allegations of Trump-Russia collusion following an executive order from President Donald Trump directing their declassification.
Nearly 700 pages of these records—labeled the “Crossfire Hurricane Redacted Binder” and dated April 9, 2025—have also been obtained exclusively by Just the News.
The move by Trump and Patel relates to a March executive order aimed at completing the declassification of records tied to the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation—an effort that had been blocked by Trump’s own Justice Department in January 2021 during the final days of his first term.
It also comes after four years of resistance from the Biden-era DOJ and FBI, led by former Attorney General Merrick Garland and ex-FBI Director Christopher Wray, who refused to release the documents.
The FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which targeted both then-candidate and later President Trump in 2016 and beyond, was launched based on unsubstantiated allegations of collusion with the Russian government.
It was later widely criticized as a politically driven effort by elements within the intelligence and law enforcement community to undermine Trump’s presidency.
Trump’s March order is titled “Immediate Declassification of Materials Related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.” In the order, he references his earlier, unsuccessful attempt to declassify the same materials on his final full day in office during his first term.
“I have determined that all of the materials referenced in the Presidential Memorandum of January 19, 2021 … are no longer classified,” he said in announcing the order.
Trump’s January 2021 order referenced a binder of materials related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which he said was delivered to the White House by the Justice Department at his request on December 30, 2020.
“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 Hillary 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.”
Prominent Democrats like now-Sen. Adam Schiff of California continued to repeat the false allegations in the media anyway, however.
