Binders Full Of Russians
The mysterious case of Trump's crusade to declassify a "binder" full of top secret documents about his collusion with Russia in the 2016 election.
CNN reported last week that a top secret binder relating to operation “Crossfire Hurricane” went missing in the final days of the Trump presidency. It was not a new story, but it sure felt like one with so many new details added. The fact of the missing binder was already known to some extent and reported originally in Raw Story, based on accounts in the book Enough by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. In it, Hutchinson provided details of the 10-inch thick “Binder” about Russian election interference in the 2016 election, and about the mad scramble in the final days of the Trump presidency to declassify it and make and distribute copies of it to Trump loyalists. She even recounted how she had seen her boss Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff, walk out with the original tucked under his arm.
The CNN story fleshed out the roles of two other figures central to the trail of the Binder: Trump loyalist Kash Patel and right-wing journalist, John Solomon. As details of their involvement in Bindergate emerged from the reporting, I was struck immediately by this fact: Trump had personally appointed both of these men as his representatives to the National Archives in June of 2022.
That’s when something clicked into place for me. Trump’s long quest to retrieve “presidential records” from the National Archives after leaving office, with Patel and Solomon later leading the charge, was almost entirely related to his obsessive desire to put classified details of the Crossfire Hurricane report before the public.
And the whole “Trump declassified everything” line we kept hearing from Patel after the Mar-a-Lago search and recovery of classified documents? It likely has much to do with the Russian Binder.
To understand why that is, we need to take a bit of a dive into the facts. These include CNN’s and the New York Times’ reporting on the Binder, Cassidy Hutchinson’s personal account in her book, Kash Patel’s interviews and statements, and a lawsuit on behalf of John Solomon against the National Archives to demand the release of the Binder.
This will shed light on some of the following questions still lingering around the material:
What was Trump trying to accomplish by declassifying the Binder and the GOP House Intelligence Committee report relating to it?
Why was Trump so adamant in defying the demands of the National Archives to return documents he took to Mar-a-Lago, and did the Binder have anything to do with it?
Why did Trump appoint Patel and Solomon as his “representatives” with the National Archives?
What might have happened to the Binder, and has the trail really gone cold?
Today we’ll pull on some threads and see where they lead. We may not emerge with full answers, but something tells me we are on the right trail here.
Trump’s Obsession: Operation Crossfire Hurricane
The counterintelligence operation related to Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election was known as “Crossfire Hurricane.” U.S. intelligence during the Obama administration had looked deeply into how Russia had attempted to interfere with the election, and specifically whether any members of the Trump campaign had coordinated with the Russians in any way. The thick Binder contained its methods, sources and findings.
No wonder, then, that Trump was so obsessed with it—as well as a House GOP-led classified report about the intelligence. As with any report, the intelligence set forth its conclusions but also any caveats and discussions about doubts or errors in intelligence gathering. The report would support the notion that the Russians interfered in order to help Trump, and there was not much Trump could do to stop that from being known.
But it would be to Trump’s advantage to highlight any problems with the intelligence. That would help him make his case to the American public that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russians, and that the “Russia Russia Russia hoax” was designed by “the deep state” to target him unfairly, even though the evidence suggested that there was in fact some coordination—just not enough to bring criminal charges.
For some time after the Binder’s creation, Trump’s allies had been seeking to access the intelligence to prove a specific counternarrative: that the Obama Administration had actively skewed the intelligence that had concluded Putin had worked to help get Trump elected. The Binder contained what the New York Times described as a “hodgepodge of materials related to the origin and early stages of the Russia investigation” which included “copies of botched FBI applications for national security surveillance warrants to wiretap a former Trump adviser as well as text messages between two F.B.I. officials involved in the inquiry, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, expressing animus toward Mr. Trump.”
If Trump’s allies could highlight these errors and this bias by two agents, it could call the whole report and its conclusions into doubt.
The Trump allies included then Rep. Devin Nunes, who was the powerful Chair of the House Intelligence Committee at the time. Nunes and his cronies even wrote up their own report, concluding that the intelligence about Russian interference actually proved the opposite: that they actually tried to help Hillary Clinton win, which defied both the evidence and common sense. Still, it was an “official” report, and Trump wanted to weaponize it the way he had weaponized the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server and he had tried to weaponize a fake Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens.
Notably, a Republican Senate Intelligence Committee report had deemed the original Russian intelligence report to be “sound” and found that there had been no political pressure on analysts to reach any specific conclusions. In other words, the GOP House report was almost certainly a highly partisan spin designed to throw chum in the water.
Trump has never gotten a chance to make the “favorable” GOP report public, even while Democrats who have viewed it claim it doesn’t nearly do what the GOP claims. That report, along with most of the Binder itself, remains classified and unreleased because it also contains a lot of sensitive intelligence information. The inability to use the GOP report as part of his “Russia hoax” narrative has been burning a hole through Trump’s psyche since that report came out. The President of the United States, not allowed to make public what his own GOP allies concluded?
As discussed in the next section, Trump tried hard to release details of Crossfire Hurricane to the public—via his handpicked conduits—throughout much of, and especially in the final days of, his presidency. But it’s important to recognize that the “public” release he sought was nothing of the kind.
As with the Mueller Report and the January 6 security camera footage, it is part of the GOP playbook to claim that “everything” has been released, even while keeping all of the supporting information in the hands of spin doctors. This allows them to be selective and dishonest about what’s actually in them. A loyalist’s gloss upon the findings successfully sets the parameters of the national discussion for days, as the rest of the press simply publishes what it knows, all filtered through the right Trump loyalists.
This is what Bill Barr did with the Mueller Report when he created a misleading “summary” of it that was dutifully reported on by the press as if it were fact, and which Mueller openly complained was a mischaracterization of his work. And it’s what former Speaker Kevin McCarthy did when he provided exclusive access to the January 6 security camera footage to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, all so he could show selective shots of “peaceful” protestors to create a counterfactual narrative.
And this is precisely what Trump tried to do with the Crossfire Hurricane Binder.
The “turducken” problem
Trump was bent on declassifying both the Binder and the GOP report and getting it in the hands of favorable right-wing press and Congressional allies so they could do their spin.
The problem was, the Binder and the GOP report contained some of the most sensitive national security information imaginable: methodologies and sources that, if compromised, could spell disaster. In the wrong hands, it could destroy painstakingly crafted intelligence operations, years in the making, and even put the lives of agents and sources in grave danger. That’s why, normally, only authorized persons with high-level security clearance could view the documents and the GOP report.
Those parts were so sensitive, and so dangerous were they to leak, that the CIA put the entire Binder inside of a safe inside of a secure vault, leading some officials to refer to it as a “turducken.” Only people with the highest levels of security clearance could access the vault and then the safe, and the Binder itself could never leave.
Trump tried to get his hands on the Binder so he could have the parts of it he liked copied and disseminated. But the CIA director at the time, Gina Haspel, stood in the way. This was a fight that lasted throughout the Trump Administration. One Trump adviser even suggested firing Haspel and putting a Trump loyalist (Kash Patel) who was once an aide to Devin Nunes, in charge. That never happened, thankfully.
Instead, higher-ups in the White House tried to run some light interference. Bill Barr, who was the Attorney General at the time, worked with the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, to keep Trump happy. They did this by allowing some documents to be declassified, while keeping the crown jewels on Russian intelligence still classified, including the Binder and the GOP report.
As to Trump’s request to declassify the entire report, intelligence officials said no, and rightly so. Trump’s desire to score political points could not justify revealing the sensitive nature of the intelligence gathering process and potential sources. For his part, however, Trump couldn’t stomach that something like “national security” would carry more weight than his own personal political vendetta.
According to Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, once the adults were gone, precautions around the Binder started to unravel. Four days after Barr resigned, on December 19, 2020, Nunes met with then Chief of Staff Mark Meadows at the White House to discuss declassification of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.
The Binder left the secure facility and wound up, somehow, in Meadows’s safe in the White House—hardly the kind of secure place needed for such a dangerous and important item.
The mad scramble to redact
Meadows claims in his book that he personally went through every page of the Binder to make sure Trump’s blanket declassification didn’t compromise any sources or methods. But he also had many Congressional aides going through it (it comprises some 2,400 pages), furiously redacting key parts out.
Let’s stop here a moment. Trump claimed he has the unilateral power to declassify the Binder. But because it also contained such top secret material that there was no way it should go out unredacted, a number of people without anywhere near the right level of security clearance were reviewing and redacting the top secret material, and doing so in a decidedly insecure facility.
So much for the turducken.
Cassidy Hutchinson recalls one instance that underscores this point. According to her book, Meadows once asked her to retrieve the binder, then complained when she said it was in the safe. “I told you not to let it out of your sight. It should have been in your desk drawer.”
Her desk drawer? The casual use of ballrooms and bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago are starting to have some context.
The FBI was, understandably, freaking out by this time. They wrote the White House urging no further declassification because of the potential of revealing sensitive intelligence collection techniques, damaging foreign partners and endangering human sources. The stakes could not be higher.
But Trump didn’t care. With the clock ticking down, on January 19, 2021, the day before he was to leave the White House, he ordered full declassification of the Crossfire Hurricane materials. He wanted the Binder’s contents provided to right-wing media, including a conservative journalist named John Solomon, who apparently understood the assignment. Solomon, of course, had no security clearance at all and no authority to review any of the material.
Paper grocery bags
The next part reads like a movie script and is based on a court filing by Solomon as part of his quest to retrieve from the National Archives the Binder that was once promised to him.
On the night of January 19, 2021, Solomon went to the White House to review the “declassified” documents from the Binder. One of his staffers left the White House with some of the “declassified” documents in a paper bag.
Solomon had scanners set up offsite so that could make himself a full copy of the Binder. But before he could do this, he and his team received a call from White House counsel asking that the documents be returned for additional redactions under the Privacy Act, because, at a minimum, the report contained some private information about and communications between agents. White House lawyers demanded the documents that had just been distributed on Meadows’ orders be retrieved in full because they were still full of classified information.
Indeed, it appears that Meadows had ordered several copies of the Binder be made and distributed. Hutchinson wrote in her book about a telling exchange between her and White House lawyer Pat Philbin, who understood immediately that they were facing a crisis.
“How many copies of that Crossfire Hurricane binder did Mark make?” Pat huffed. “How many have been distributed?”
“Slow down,” I said to Pat, trying to keep up with his questions, many of which I did not have a response to. “How many copies? I have no idea. There are some in our office…” I glanced around. There were many binders strewn around with still-classified but supposedly soon-to-be-declassified information, but the Crossfire Hurricane binders were easy to identify because of how thick they were.
“Did Mark already give copies to Mollie Hemingway and John Solomon?” Pat asked, referring to the conservative journalists who the president and Mark were acquainted with. I nodded. “Yeah, he had a few of his Secret Service agents meet Mollie and John at Georgetown earlier tonight while you were all in the Oval Office with the boss. The color drained from his face. “Seriously?” he asked.
Yes, this was a major disaster.
The White House lawyers scrambled to order all copies of the Binder returned immediately. The documents that Solomon had been given eventually made it back to the White House the next morning, on January 20, but they were apparently in loose form. They were picked up by the Secret Service inside a Whole Foods grocery bag, according to Hutchinson.
That same day, Meadows brought a copy (apparently not the original) of the Binder that Trump had ordered declassified for one final review by the Department of Justice. The Department accepted that Binder, but it has not since released it, citing Privacy Act and other security concerns.
It is unclear what happened to all the other redacted or partially redacted copies of the Binder that were in Meadows’ office. Meadows has been known to destroy documents in his fireplace, but it’s unclear if that’s what happened here, or if redacted versions left the White House in any way. The Times reported that agents searching Mar-a-Lago did not find any Crossfire Hurricane material.
Whereabouts of the original binder
It’s now clear there was a copy of the Binder that Meadows gave the Department of Justice but never got back. But what about the original unredacted binder, the one with all the top secret information still visible in it? Where did it go?
According to Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadows almost certainly removed the Binder from that safe. In fact, Hutchinson testified and wrote in her book that she saw him carrying it out of the White House, tucked under his arm. Per CNN’s reporting,
Hutchinson writes in her book that she saw Meadows get into his limo the night of January 19 with the “original Crossfire Hurricane binder tucked under his arm.”
“What the hell is Mark doing with the unredacted Crossfire Hurricane binder?” Hutchinson recalled asking herself as Meadows drove away.
When she looked in Meadows’ safe for the last time before she left the White House, Hutchinson said it was gone.
“I don't think that would have been something that he would have destroyed,” Hutchinson told the January 6 committee. “It was not returned anywhere, and it never left our office to go internally anywhere. It stayed in our safe, in the office safe most of the time.”
After that, no one except perhaps Meadows and Trump—or Trump's designated National Archive representatives, Patel and Solomon— knows what happened to the original, unredacted Binder.
The New York Times report did drop a coy hint about this in its story, however. It states,
Mr. Trump was deeply focused on what was in the binder, a person close to him said. Even after leaving the White House, Mr. Trump still wanted to push information from the binder into the public eye. He suggested, during an April 2021 interview for a book about the Trump presidency, that Mr. Meadows still had the material.
“I would let you look at them if you wanted,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “It’s a treasure trove.”
Mr. Trump did not address a question about whether he himself had some of the material. But when a Trump aide present for the interview asked him, “Does Meadows have those?” Mr. Trump replied, “Meadows has them.”
The Times does not identify who was conducting the April 2021 interview about the Trump presidency, but reporter Maggie Haberman, who helped write the Times piece, happened to have been writing a book about Trump’s time in office, and my bet is that she was the “source” for this reporting.
If both Hutchinson and Trump say that Meadows has the materials, Meadows has some serious explaining to do. His lawyer provided a statement that, to this lawyer’s ear, was a careful dance around the truth:
“Mr. Meadows was keenly aware and adhered to the requirements for the proper handling of classified material, any such material that he handled or was in his possession has been treated accordingly and any suggestion that he is responsible for any missing binder or other classified information is flat wrong.”
What this statement doesn’t deny, however, is that Meadows took the original Binder, perhaps on orders from the former president or under the broad belief that he was doing nothing wrong because it had all verbally been “declassified.”
Consider this as well: The very existence of the original Binder is a hot potato that presents whoever may have it with a serious problem. They can’t admit to having it without raising the possibility that they violated the law and will be charged for mishandling state secrets. And they can’t reveal anything they consider “favorable” to Trump from within it without some kind of cover, e.g., that the National Archives itself release the information in unredacted form.
That brings us to the next telling part of this story: the effort to obtain the redacted Binder from the National Archives.
Possession is nine-tenths
When it became clear that Trump had taken classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago and was actively working to keep them from being returned, there was speculation as to why. Was he trying to offer them to the highest bidder? Was he some kind of weird hoarder? Did he see these as symbols of his presidency and just couldn’t let go?
Or, as I have always believed, did he recognize that the records were something the government wanted back from him, and therefore he instinctively viewed them as somehow valuable as a bargaining chip?
Imagine Trump learning on the morning of January 20, 2021, hours before he is supposed to leave the White House, that the Binder he was so obsessed about—and which he finally got out of the “turducken” precisely so he could give an original copy to partisan reporters— was actually not fully declassified as he had ordered? And that White House lawyers instead had scrambled that morning and retrieved all the copies, including the ones that had been made for the reporters? And then imagine him learning that his own Chief of Staff turned a redacted copy over to the Justice Department, out of “an abundance of caution”?
Trump would have been livid. In his mind, it would have been yet another example of the “deep state” countermanding his authority as president. Now that he was no longer president, in order to get a copy that he could hand to reporters without breaking the law, Trump would have to go the long and proper way and demand back the very copy Meadows had turned over to the Justice Department.
So what does this have to do with the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case? It’s helpful to retrace a few steps here.
In the final days and hours of the Trump presidency, scores of boxes left the White House and made their way to Mar-a-Lago. It was an archivist’s nightmare because nearly all of that material belonged not to Trump but to the American people. It needed to be retrieved and archived for historical purposes.
In late 2021, Trump came up with a plan to respond to the National Archives’ increased pressure on him to return documents that he’d taken to Mar-a-Lago: strike a deal. According to reporting by the New York Times, Trump told his advisors in late 2021 that, in exchange for the National Archives giving him what he wanted, namely the Binder, he would agree to return the boxes he’d taken.
Trump’s aides didn’t follow through with this request, perhaps for the obvious reason that it would reveal Trump’s corrupt intent and willful withholding of documents. But it sheds important light on how Trump viewed his position and the documents he still had: They were leverage for getting the documents he still didn’t possess.
In early 2022, after Trump finally returned some 15 boxes of records he’d taken with him, the National Archives realized going through them that Trump had taken classified information with him to Mar-a-Lago. It referred the matter to the Justice Department. And that led ultimately to the warranted search and recovery of classified documents and to the charges he now faces.
Why Patel and Solomon?
One thing had never made sense to me, at least until I read the CNN and New York Times reporting. Trump had picked Patel and Solomon as his representatives to deal with the National Archives. But why pick them, especially when you’re in the middle of a fight with the Justice Department over documents?
Trump’s decision to put Patel and Solomon on the matter shows one thing fairly clearly about his state of mind. While the Department of Justice was interested in getting back any classified documents still in Trump’s possession, Trump was still mostly obsessed with Crossfire Hurricane. Both Patel and Solomon understood how important the Binder was to Trump so he could attack the Russian interference narrative. Seen in this context, it makes sense that Trump appointed them, even in the midst of a high-stakes battle with the Justice Department in June of 2022.
If you recall, Patel was the Nunes aide who was most adamant in seeking to obtain a declassified version of the GOP Report on Crossfire Hurricane. Trump liked Patel because it was clear he understood how to weaponize intelligence. Right after the search of Mar-a-Lago took place, it was Patel who went on national television and declared, to much derision, that Trump had “declassified” everything. Patel insisted in interviews with right-wing media that Trump “declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read themselves.” In other words, Patel was parroting Trump’s belief and spin, insinuating that the government was hiding the truth from the American public by refusing to release the top secret findings.
For his part, Solomon was the right-wing journalist whom Trump and Meadows made sure got a copy of the Binder. Solomon still really wanted to kiss up to Trump and report authoritatively about certain mistakes of intelligence within Crossfire Hurricane. It’s potentially a huge scoop. But without an authorized, redacted version of the Binder as a source, he’s also stymied.
Solomon wrote to the National Archives’ general counsel about it not long after being appointed. “There is a binder of documents from the Russia investigation that the President declassified with an order in his last few days in office. It's about 10 inches thick,” he wrote. “We'd like to make a set of copies -- digital or paper format -- of every document that was declassified by his order and included in the binder.”
Here’s the rather nutty thing. Both Patel and Solomon worked to obtain a legit, redacted copy of the Binder from the National Archives so they could spin it for Trump, even while the actual, unredacted original likely was not far from their grasp. If Trump and Hutchinson are correct, that original Binder is in the hands of Meadows.
It’s just that no one can admit that, least of all Meadows.
Concluding thoughts
If Jack Smith knows more about the Binder than the media or the public, he isn’t saying. New reporting may focus his interest again on it, and if laws were broken in the mishandling of the document, he can bring charges, likely after Trump’s own case is over. Indeed, the possibility of such charges could become a useful tool in exacting cooperation.
The Binder saga also underscores the utter hypocrisy of the Republican Party when it comes to the handling of classified materials, including top secret documents such as those included in the Binder. This isn’t some instance where the use of a private email server results in the inadvertent inclusion of documents marked as classified. This is, once again, the nation’s top secrets, so valuable that they needed a safe within a vault to keep them secure. But under Trump, they were photocopying and scanning the Binder in the final hours of his presidency, sending top secret pages to reporters back and forth in paper bags, with the original, most valuable version still mysteriously unaccounted for.
It makes me feel physically sick to read about highly classified, extraordinarily sensitive information being in the possession of, and treated so cavalierly by, people who clearly would betray the nation for power and position.
Why isn't Meadows being sweated under a bright light in a sealed room? Why hasn't a search warrant been served on Meadows properties, banks, storage vaults, etc.? What is being done to retrieve this document? I don't understand.