FBI Director Kash Patel found a trove of classified documents related to the Trump-Russia probe buried inside “burn bags” in a secret room at FBI headquarters, Fox News reported on Wednesday.
Among the thousands of documents discovered was the classified annex of special counsel John Durham’s final report on the Russian collusion conspiracy, according to multiple sources cited by Fox News. Durham’s classified annex reportedly contains the purported evidence against President Donald Trump that he reviewed. The burn bags found by Patel are used to destroy classified documents.
Sources told Fox News that the classified annex contains evidence from “credible foreign sources” indicating that the FBI might have played a role in spreading the Trump–Russia collusion conspiracy before it launched the Crossfire Hurricane probe.
“Ultimately, the release of the classified annex will lend more credibility to the assertion that there was a coordinated plan inside the U.S. government to help the Clinton campaign stir up controversy connecting Trump to Russia,” said one source who spoke to Fox News on condition of anonymity.
The Trump administration is in the process of declassifying Durham’s annex as Patel coordinates with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and acting National Security Agency Director William Hartman. The report comes shortly after Gabbard released documents indicating that the Obama administration knew it had no evidence to pin Trump on the bogus Russian collusion charges, but pushed the narrative forward anyway.
Gabbard said that the evidence points to former President Barack Obama “leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment.” President Trump accused Obama of committing “criminal acts” over the Russiagate hoax, adding that the former president, along with other Democrats, should face “severe consequences.” Trump said earlier this week, however, that the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity last year would likely shield Obama from prosecution.
The FBI has opened investigations into former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey over their role in the Trump-Russia probe.
Patel and his team reportedly found the documents in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) that was previously undisclosed in the FBI headquarters. The FBI director hinted at finding a secret room at the bureau’s headquarters during a June interview with podcast giant Joe Rogan, but he did not reveal what documents the room contained.
“Just think about this,” Patel said during the interview. “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.'”