A top-secret document containing approximately 3,000 pages of material related to the US investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and Moscow’s connection with Trump went missing in the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency..
The document was ordered by Trump to be declassified before he left office, and the CIA was instructed to provide a binder containing the Russia intelligence along with other documents to facilitate this process.
The Russia papers contained highly sensitive raw intelligence that the United States and its NATO partners had obtained, which raised concerns that the information-gathering techniques might have been compromised.
The binder also contained other information related to the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, including materials on the origins of the probe collected by Trump aides and botched FBI applications for wiretap warrants. The binder also included anti-Trump text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were involved in the probe.
According to a federal court document submitted by conservative journalist John Solomon in August, Mark Meadows, who served as Trump’s last chief of staff, was involved in handling the missing binder and developing a strategy to release the materials that Trump planned to declassify. Solomon was appointed by Trump as a representative with access rights to National Archives documents pertaining to his administration.
The binder was characterised as being ten inches thick, and much of the material it contained was not considered sensitive. A heavily redacted version of the binder was declassified and posted in five parts on the FBI’s website in 2022.
Solomon’s federal court filing said that just before Trump left office after his defeat by President Joe Biden, Meadows told Solomon that Trump intended to order the declassification of the Crossfire Hurricane materials in the binder.
Two days before his term ended, Trump and Meadows told Solomon that the binder had been declassified. On Jan. 19, Meadows invited Solomon to the White House to review several hundred declassified pages and discuss the materials’ public release. However, copies were provided to Solomon, and as he began preparing a story for his website, he received a call from the White House asking that copies be returned for additional redactions. Meadows promised Solomon that he would receive the revised binder, but this never happened.
Despite efforts to locate the missing binder, there has been no trace of the classified version since then. The disappearance of the binder raised serious concerns, and the administration offered to brief the Senate Intelligence Committee last year after its disappearance. The committee accepted the offer and was briefed on the matter.
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