A classified annex to a report produced by Special Counsel John Durham was discovered “buried in a back room at the FBI,” according to FBI Director Kash Patel.
The document was declassified and released by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on July 31.
According to Patel, thousands of other documents were discovered as well in the room at FBI headquarters.
Durham was appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr in 2020 to review the investigations into alleged ties between candidate and later President Donald Trump and Russia.
Durham’s report concluded in 2023 that no collusion with Russia took place, finding that the FBI probe into the allegations was “seriously deficient” and tainted by “confirmation bias” on the part of agents who personally opposed Trump’s candidacy.
He also concluded that “neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.” Crossfire Hurricane is the FBI’s codename for the agency’s investigation of the Trump campaign.
The FBI had “significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” the report reads.
The declassified annex of the report covers additional information that relates to the investigative referral of the actions by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as it relates to the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. It also deals with the threat of election influence by a foreign government as well as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Grassley in a statement said that the “FBI failed to adequately review” the intelligence information they had on the allegations.
The disclosure of the document is the latest in a string of documents released related to the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion investigations.
A declassified House intelligence report released this month by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stated that there was only a single piece of classified evidence for the allegation and was “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports.”
Separately, a review by the CIA ordered by Director John Ratcliffe found there was significant opposition from analysts within the agency when it came to the allegations, including those contained in the Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Clinton campaign.
“The ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers—including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia—strongly opposed including the Dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards,” a CIA note released by Ratcliffe on July 2 read.
In the note, the CIA’s deputy director for analysis warned then-CIA Director John Brennan that including the dossier in any form risked undermining “the credibility of the entire paper.”
However, Brennan ordered that the dossier remain in the assessment and wrote, “My bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
Former President Barack Obama and top officials in his administration, including Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, have since in public statements described the accusations of them targeting Trump out of political motivations as false.
Patel previously referenced the discovery of hidden documents in a June interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, describing a room full of documents and storage units “that no one had ever seen or heard of.”
“Just think about this,” Patel said. “Me, as director of the FBI, the former ‘Russiagate guy,’ when I first got to the bureau, found a room that Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building—full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of—locked the key and hid access and just said, ‘No one’s ever gonna find this place.’”
