Trump-Ordered Declassification Unleashes Hundreds of Pages from FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Probe
FBI Director Kash Patel has delivered hundreds of pages of declassified documents to Congress from the bureau’s now-discredited “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, following a sweeping executive order by former President Donald Trump. The investigation, which revolved around unfounded claims of Trump-Russia collusion, has long been mired in controversy. In a major development, Just the News has also obtained nearly 700 pages from the trove—officially labeled the “Crossfire Hurricane Redacted Binder” and dated April 9, 2025—exclusively.
This release follows Trump’s March executive order demanding the full declassification of all records tied to the Trump-Russia probe—records that had been withheld since January 2021, when Trump’s own Justice Department blocked their release during the final days of his first term.
The newly released documents come after four years of stonewalling by the Biden administration’s DOJ and FBI, then led by Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray. Both had refused to unseal the files despite Trump’s directive. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation, launched in 2016, targeted Trump both as a candidate and president based on unverified allegations of collusion with Russia—allegations that were politically fueled, in part, by efforts linked to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Over time, the investigation drew fierce criticism as a politically motivated campaign to undermine Trump’s presidency, with internal government reviews slamming its origins and execution.
Trump’s latest declassification order, titled “Immediate Declassification of Materials Related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” refers back to his January 19, 2021, order—issued on his final full day in office—when he sought to declassify the same documents. “I have determined that all of the materials referenced in the Presidential Memorandum of January 19, 2021… are no longer classified,” Trump declared in the March order.
In the original 2021 directive, Trump had announced that a binder of investigative materials—delivered to the White House by the DOJ on December 30, 2020—should be declassified “to the maximum extent possible.” Although he accepted some FBI-recommended redactions, Trump ordered the rest to be made public. But the Justice Department ultimately refused to carry out the order after he left office.
Even a last-minute memo from then–White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, delivered the morning of Inauguration Day, insisted that the DOJ must release the declassified binder after a Privacy Act review. Yet under Garland and Wray, the DOJ and FBI kept the files sealed, directly defying the Trump-era orders.
Years of scrutiny have since undermined the original foundation of the Trump-Russia narrative. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year probe failed to establish any criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia. Meanwhile, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz uncovered deep flaws in the FBI’s handling of the case, including its reliance on the now-infamous Steele dossier—compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and commissioned through opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was paid by the Clinton campaign via lawyer Marc Elias.
A later investigation by Special Counsel John Durham delivered a scathing conclusion: neither the FBI nor the broader intelligence community had any verified evidence of Trump-Russia collusion when Crossfire Hurricane was launched. Durham’s report noted that investigators “ignored the fact that at no time before, during, or after Crossfire Hurricane were they able to corroborate a single substantive allegation in the Steele dossier.”
Now, with the long-suppressed documents finally seeing daylight, Trump allies argue that the American public is one step closer to understanding how a politically charged investigation became one of the most controversial episodes in modern U.S. intelligence history.
