Highly classified US intel on Russia went missing under Trump

Highly classified American intelligence related to Russia went missing in the last days of Donald Trump’s presidency according to a new investigation from CNN. Here’s what was reported and why it worried the intelligence community. 

Unnamed sources close to the situation revealed that a binder containing classified raw intelligence gathered by the United States and its NATO allies on Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election disappeared when Trump left office. 

The missing intelligence included information on “Russians and Russian agents” as well as the sources and methods that helped the government determine that Russian President Vladimir Putin did seek to help Trump win the 2016 election. 

The disappearance of the binder and its contents was so concerning that officials in the intelligence community briefed leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding the missing intel and their attempts to retrieve the materials. 

“In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found,” CNN reported. But the means by which the binder of intelligence went missing was quite bizarre in its own right. 

The intelligence contained in the binder was so sensitive that lawmakers and their aides who had the appropriate level of top-secret security clearance were only allowed to look at material at the Central Intelligence Agency’s Langley headquarters. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Carol M. Highsmith

Trump had the top-secret material sent to the White House in the last days of his time in office along with a host of other documents so that he could declassify them as part of a larger effort to release a host of documents to the public. 

“Under the care of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the binder was scoured by Republican aides working to redact the most sensitive information so it could be declassified and released publicly,” CNN explained. 

Information of Russian interference in the 2016 election made up only a small part of what was described to journalists as a ten-inch thick binder, and it also included “reams of information” about the FBI's ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation.

Crossfire Hurricane was the codename for the FBI's investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and it sought to determine if anyone who was associated with the former president’s election campaign coordinated with Russia. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0

Most of the binder's contents were declassified by the former president in the final days of his time in office. Several redacted copies of the missing binder were created by the White House to distribute to right-wing journalists. 

Some versions of the copied binders were allegedly sent out but were quickly retrieved on the order of White House lawyers who demanded that more redactions be made to the materials before they were released. 

Much of the information that the missing binder contained has not been released by the Justice Department to this day according to CNN, but copies of the binder's materials at varying levels of redaction were sent to the National Archives. 

The issue with the original binder that went missing from the White House when Trump left office was that the information contained within was raw intelligence that had not been redacted, which was a worrying problem considering the nature of the material.

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By United States Department of Justice

“The circumstances surrounding [the binder's] disappearance remain shrouded in mystery,” according to CNN, which added that the government has declined to talk about its efforts to retrieve the binder and hasn’t confirmed any intel went missing. 

Details of the investigation from CNN were confirmed by the New York Times after they were published on December 15th. However, the Times did add two important points to the reporting on the missing binder. 

“It is not clear if the missing material comprises the entire original binder of material provided to the White House for Mr. Trump’s team to review and declassify in part before leaving office,” Times journalists wrote. 

“Among other murky details, it is not known how many copies were made at the White House or how the government knows one set is missing,” the New York Times added in its report on the binder. 

The current prevailing theory is that the missing binder of intelligence may have gone home with Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, something former top Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchison revealed to the January 6th Committee in closed-door testimony. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America - Mark Meadows, CC BY-SA 2.0

“I am almost positive it went home with Mr. Meadows,” Hutchison was quoted as saying by CNN. However, the claim that Meadows took the intelligence binder home with him has been refuted by his lawyer who said the theory was “flat wrong.”

Whether or not the missing binder of intelligence will be found and returned to the U.S. government is yet to be seen, but the situation reveals some of the worrying problems the country faces when it comes to its classified documents.