Kash Crisis: What is the FBI Hiding?

FBI Director Kash Patel has repeatedly vowed to bring accountability and transparency to the agency, but his tenure at the top is increasingly looking like business as usual. Judicial Watch has been warning about trouble at the FBI for months. In June, we reported that conservative insiders were alarmed by signs that Patel and then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino has been taken hostage by the Deep State consensus. Conservative distress in recent weeks has mounted over Patel’s moves to shut down a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over records in the death of January 6 victim Ashli Babbitt.

In July came bombshell news—Patel had discovered a cache of Russiagate documents in “burn bags” in a “secret room” at FBI headquarters.

A few burn bag documents were released to the public, but most were not. Along with newly disclosed material from the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence, the documents, Judicial Watch noted, added weight “to charges that starting in 2016, top government figures, including then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, [FBI Director James] Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Hillary Clinton and others conspired to protect the Clinton presidential candidacy, defame candidate Donald Trump, and later destroy his presidency.”

Discrepancies soon began to creep in to Patel’s descriptions of the discovery of the documents. In June, teasing their upcoming release, Patel told Joe Rogan, “Just think about this. 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.’’

By December, the story had shifted. Patel now told Fox News that there was not “a room” but multiple rooms—secret rooms “hidden away from the map” of the building, rooms no one had access to. And many burn bags. “And once we got into those rooms,” Patel said, “we found more information related to the Russiagate hoax from prior FBI leadership. Information that was in burn bags that they wanted to have destroyed, but for whatever reason, no one ever got around to it, or they thought we would just never find it.”

The mystery deepened. Was it one room or many rooms? How many rooms? What was the history of the secret rooms? How many burn bags were there? What exactly was in the burn bags? Where did they come from? Were there other documents, perhaps not in burn bags, in the rooms?

These are not incidental questions. The FBI has a long history of burying inconvenient information.

Judicial Watch started seeking answers.

In June, we sent a FOIA request to the FBI seeking “all documents” related to the room, all FBI communications between Patel and Bongino about the discovery of the documents, and all directives sent to FBI offices about handling the documents. The FBI ignored the request—a clear violation of FOIA law.

In November, we sued the Justice Department for the secret room information. “We know Comey was spying on Donald Trump,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “He was the Obama administration’s go-to guy, trying to set Trump up to be toppled from the campaign and then from office. These hidden-room documents may contain additional smoking guns.”

Also in November, we filed a second FOIA tightly focused on the burn bags.

The FBI again ignored the lawful request.

In February, we sued again. The second lawsuit contains important new details. It zeroes in on a court filing, Document 138-12, which notes “an original referral by the Central Intelligence Agency to former FBI Director James Comey” containing “certain intelligence related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.”

Could this be a key Russiagate document—a smoking gun pointing to the origin of the effort to topple Trump?

The February lawsuit specifically asks for the original CIA referral to Comey. It also seeks the full contents of the burn bags, including all unclassified documents related to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search, the January 6 events at the Capitol, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and the Durham investigation. For classified documents, we requested a Vaughn Index that briefly describes and justifies the withholding of classified material.

The curious case of the secret rooms could go beyond Russiagate. What else is hidden at FBI headquarters? More Epstein files? Reports on the Benghazi attack? Evidence of the FBI’s role in the Harlem Mosque Incident murder of a New York City patrolman? Evidence of the alleged presence of federal agents at the assassination of Malcolm X? Kash Patel promised a “wave of transparency” at the FBI to restore public trust. He could start by literally cleaning house—turning over all the burn bag records to Judicial Watch and searching every nook and cranny at FBI headquarters for more secret rooms and secret files.

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Micah Morrison is chief investigative reporter for Judicial Watch. Tips: mmorrison@judicialwatch.org

Investigative Bulletin is published by Judicial Watch. Reprints and media inquiries: jfarrell@judicialwatch.org

 

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