What Were Those Burn Bags The FBI Was Hiding From Trump?

Americans may soon learn what documents FBI officials tried to destroy before incoming Trump administration appointees could find them.

The non-profit public interest law firm Judicial Watch announced in a statement that it “filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice concerning the discovery and contents of ‘burn bags’ found in a secured Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headquarters in Washington, DC (Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:26-cv-00538)).”

“The Biden-Harris FBI was engaged in a cover-up. The number of smoking guns in these burn bags is likely substantial,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Judicial Watch reports it “filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Justice Department failed to respond to a November 2025 FOIA request for records related to five burn bags discovered in Room 9582 Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at FBI Headquarters, as described in an Opening Electronic Communication dated July 21, 2025, filed as Document 138-12 in Case No. 1:25-cr-00272-MSN-WEF on November 3, 2025.”

Judicial Watch’s FOIA request specifically asks for:

Contents of the Burn Bags:

a) All unclassified documents or releasable portions thereof, including any related to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search, January 6 Capitol breach, Crossfire Hurricane investigation, or the Classified Appendix to the John Durham Special Counsel investigation.

b) For classified documents: A Vaughn Index justifying the withholding or detailed list including titles, dates, classification levels, origin (e.g., agency/source), brief non-exempt descriptions, and specific exemption.

Counterintelligence Operational Lead:

The original CIA referral to former FBI Director James Comey, dated September 7, 2016, containing intelligence related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign (found in a storage closet adjacent to the Director’s office and transported to Room 9582 SCIF). Include any unclassified summaries, logs, reports, transmittal records, or assessments of its authenticity/relevance. 

Related Contextual Records:

Any unclassified portions of the Director’s Advisory Team’s 60-day internal review (initiated on or about April 15, 2025), including badge access logs, IMD/SecD consultations, employee interview notes (from the three conflicting accounts mentioned), and assessments of Capstone/[National Archives and Records Administration] compliance.

Judicial Watch reports that “in July 2025, FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly found records related to the origins of the Trump–Russia probe buried in multiple ‘burn bags’ in a previously undisclosed SCIF at FBI Headquarters. The records indicate the U.S. intelligence community had ‘credible foreign sources indicating that the FBI would play a role in spreading the alleged Trump–Russia collusion narrative — before the bureau ever launched its controversial Crossfire Hurricane probe.’”

“We just uncovered burn bags/room filled with hidden Russia Gate files, including the Durham annex, and declassified them,” Patel posted to X on August 2, 2025.

In September 2020 a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee detailing the 2016 investigative referral, then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe wrote:

On [September 7, 2016], U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding “U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.” 

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.