Documents Stuffed Into Burn-Bags At FBI HQ To Be Made Public: Kash Patel

Authored by Zachary Stieber and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

Sensitive documents found in burn bags at FBI headquarters will all be made public, FBI Director Kash Patel said in a new interview with The Epoch Times.

“You’re going to see everything we found in that room in one way or another, be it through investigation, public trial, or disclosure to the Congress,” Patel told The Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek in an exclusive interview, which is set to air on EpochTV at 5 p.m. ET on Nov. 29.

Before becoming FBI director, one of Patel’s past roles was working as a congressional investigator. He was on the House Intelligence Committee team that uncovered previously unknown information about the FBI’s probe of possible links between the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump and Russia.

The probe and fallout over the information that emerged, including the reliance on a dossier compiled on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, has come to be known as “Russia Gate.”

Patel said on X in August that “we just uncovered burn bags/room filled with hidden Russia Gate files, including the Durham annex, and declassified them.”

The declassified annex to a report from former special counsel John Durham, whose team investigated the FBI’s actions and found that the full probe was based on unverified intelligence, was released in July by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). It showed that the FBI did not adequately review reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been promoting a false narrative connecting Trump to Russia, Grassley said at the time.

Clinton’s office has not commented on the annex. Robby Mook, Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, has said he believed that work done by the international law firm Perkins Coie, which paid the dossier author, “was done for the purpose of providing legal services and legal advice” to the campaign.

During a hearing in September, Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Wis.) asked Patel why somebody would place documents related to the investigation into the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump and Russia in burn bags.

Patel said he could not comment on the case because it was ongoing.

“In general terms … a burn bag is what you use to put classified documents into, generally, because that is literally how you destroy them,” he said.

Patel told The Epoch Times that “when the United States government and agency heads want things to disappear and want things to be buried and hidden, they know how to do it.”

“But what they didn’t count on was President Trump winning, him electing leadership across the United States government to say, ‘Go, find out how they corrupted and weaponized law enforcement,’ and that’s what we did—that’s what we’re doing; that’s how we found it, and we’re going to continue to expose it.”

Patel said the FBI is working with partners in Congress to release documents, including those relating to the Department of Justice investigation into Trump for alleged unlawful interference with the transfer of power after the 2020 election, which involved obtaining records from senators’ phones.

While investigations are ongoing, “we are going to have full accountability and we are going to have full transparency for the American public,” he said.