President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing the FBI to immediately declassify files concerning the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the agency probe launched in 2016 that sought information on whether Trump campaign members colluded with Russia during the presidential race.
After signing the order, Trump said that now the media can review previously withheld files pertaining to the investigation — although he cast doubt on whether many journalists would do so.
‘You probably won’t bother because you’re not going to like what you see,’ Trump said. ‘But this was total weaponization. It’s a disgrace. It should have never happened in this country. But now you’ll be able to see for yourselves. All declassified.’
The FBI on July 31, 2016, opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump, then a presidential candidate, or members of his campaign were colluding or coordinating with Russia to influence the 2016 election. That investigation was referred to inside the bureau as ‘Crossfire Hurricane.’
The opening of the investigation came just days after a July 28 meeting during which then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Barack Obama on a purported proposal from one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign foreign policy advisors ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.’ Clinton was the Democrat nominee for president that year.
By January 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey had notified Trump of a dossier, known as the Steele dossier, that contained salacious and unverified allegations about Trump’s purported coordination with the Russian government, a key document prompting the opening of the probe.
The dossier was authored by Christopher Steele, an ex-British intelligence officer, and commissioned by Fusion GPS. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS during the 2016 election cycle.
It was eventually determined that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the dossier through the law firm Perkins Coie.
Trump fired Comey in May 2017. Days later, Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to take over the ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ probe and investigate whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election cycle.
While Mueller investigated, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence opened its own investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion.
By February 2018, Kash Patel — then chief investigator for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and now the FBI Director — had uncovered widespread government surveillance abuses, including the improper surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Patel was an integral part of the creation of a memo released by Nunes in February 2018, which detailed the DOJ’s and FBI’s surveillance of Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Nunes and Patel revealed that the infamous anti-Trump dossier funded by Democrats ‘formed an essential part’ of the application to spy on Page.
The memo referred to closed-door testimony from former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who said that ‘no surveillance warrant would have been sought’ from the FISA court ‘without the Steele dossier information.’
But when applying for the FISA warrant, the FBI omitted the origins of the dossier, specifically its funding from Hillary Clinton, then Trump’s 2016 presidential opponent.
The memo also said Steele, who worked as an FBI informant, was eventually cut off from the bureau for what the FBI described as the most serious of violations, ‘an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI.’
The memo noted that the FBI and DOJ obtained ‘one initial FISA warrant’ targeting Page and three FISA renewals from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The statute required that every 90 days a FISA order on a U.S. citizen ‘must be reviewed.’
The memo revealed that Comey signed three FISA applications for Page, while McCabe, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente signed at least one.
The memo was widely criticized by Democrats but was ultimately correct.
The Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, reviewed the memo and confirmed the dossier served as the basis for the controversial FISA warrants obtained against Page.
Meanwhile, Special Counsel Robert Mueller completed his investigation into a possible Trump-Russia connection in April 2019. The extensive probe yielded no evidence of criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
After Mueller’s report was made public, then-Attorney General Bill Barr tapped John Durham, a U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to serve as special counsel to investigate the origins of ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ itself.
Durham, in his final report released in May 2023, said he found, after years of investigating, that the FBI did not have any actual evidence to support the start of that investigation. He also found that the Department of Justice and FBI ‘failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law’ when it launched the Trump-Russia investigation.
Durham also found that the FBI ‘failed to act’ on a ‘clear warning sign’ that the bureau was the ‘target’ of a Clinton-led effort to ‘manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes’ ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Durham was referring to intelligence suggesting that the Clinton campaign had a plan to link Trump to Russia, potentially as a distraction from the ongoing investigation into her use of a private email server and alleged handling of classified information.
Durham found that Brennan ‘realized the significance’ of the intelligence that Clinton was stirring up a plan to tie Trump to Russia — so much so, that he ‘expeditiously’ briefed Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and other top national security officials.
But nothing came of that briefing or of his subsequent referral of the information to the FBI, according to Durham’s final report.
‘The aforementioned facts reflect a rather startling and inexplicable failure to adequately consider and incorporate the Clinton Plan intelligence into the FBI’s investigative decision-making in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,’ Durham’s report states.
‘Indeed, had the FBI opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation as an assessment and, in turn, gathered and analyzed data in concert with the information from the Clinton Plan intelligence, it is likely that the information received would have been examined, at a minimum, with a more critical eye,’ the report continued.
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