Judicial Watch Sues Justice Dept for Records on ‘Burn Bags’ in Secret FBI Facility

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today 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)).

Judicial Watch 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.

The 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.

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.”

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

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

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 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 has been instrumental in uncovering much of what the public knows about Crossfire Hurricane/Russiagate, which involved a long list of Democratic political figures, lawyers, and staffers who shaped the narrative around the Trump-Russia hoax.

In January 2026, Judicial Watch sued the Justice Department for fully unredacted records and previously withheld or missing portions of former Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Crossfire Hurricane/Russiagate investigation.

In November 2025, Judicial Watch provided an in-depth recap of the Crossfire Hurricane/Russiagate debacle. 

In May 2025, Judicial Watch sued the Justice Department for all records regarding the FBI, under then-Director James Comey, initiating an investigation of then-2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump.

In October 2020, Judicial Watch uncovered heavily redacted email communications among top-level State Department officials and a U.S. ambassador expressing skepticism about reports by Christopher Steele’s London-based private intelligence firm Orbis Business Intelligence. (Steele was the author of the Clinton-funded, anti-Trump dossier.) The emails show one assistant secretary of state saying some of Steele’s reports sound “extreme” and others “do not ring true,” while the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine called some of the Steele reports “flaky.”

In May 2020, Judicial Watch forced the declassification and release of the “electronic communication” used to launch Crossfire Hurricane, written by former FBI official Peter Strzok.

In April 2020, Judicial Watch obtained emails between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page, including an email dated January 10, 2017, in which Strzok said that the version of the dossier published by BuzzFeed was “identical” to the version given to the FBI by McCain and had “differences” from the dossier provided to the FBI by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and Mother Jones reporter David Corn. January 10, 2017, is the same day BuzzFeed published the anti-Trump dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele. The emails also show Strzok and other FBI agents mocking President Trump a few weeks before he was inaugurated. In addition, the emails revealed that Strzok communicated with then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe about the “leak investigation” tied to the Clinton Foundation (the very leak in which McCabe was later implicated). 

In September 2019, Judicial Watch released State Department records revealing that Steele had an extensive and close working relationship dating back to May of 2014 with high-ranking Obama State Department officials including Jonathan Winer and Victoria Nuland. 

In August 2019, Judicial Watch obtained “302” report material from 2016 FBI interviews of Associate Deputy U.S. Attorney Bruce Ohr, who was removed from his position in December 2017. (A Form 302 is used by FBI agents to memorialize interviews they undertake during an investigation.) In a November 22, 2016, interview, Ohr said that “reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia were going to the Clinton Campaign, Jon Winer at the U.S. State Department and the FBI.” In a late September 2016 interview, Ohr described a person (likely Christopher Steele) as “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.” A report states that “Ohr knew that [Fusion GPS’s] Glen Simpson and others were talking to Victoria Nuland at the U.S. State Department.”

In July 2019, Judicial Watch obtained records revealing a September 2016 email exchange between then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer, a close associate of dossier author Christopher Steele, discussing a “face-to-face” meeting on a “Russian matter.”

In August 2018, the Justice Department admitted in a Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit court filing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the FISA spy warrant applications targeting Carter Page, a former Trump campaign part-time advisor who was the subject of four controversial FISA warrants.

 Judicial Watch in July 2018 released records about FISA warrants targeting Page, which appeared to confirm that the FBI and DOJ misled the FISA court by withholding material information showing that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC were behind the “intelligence” used to persuade the court to approve the FISA warrants targeting the Trump team.

###

The post Judicial Watch Sues Justice Dept for Records on ‘Burn Bags’ in Secret FBI Facility appeared first on Judicial Watch.

Source: https://www.judicialwatch.org/burn-bags-in-secret-fbi-facility/