A binder with highly classified information connected to Russian election interference disappeared at the end of Donald Trump's presidency, sparking concerns among intelligence officials that some of the nation and its allies' most tightly guarded national security secrets will be exposed, more than a dozen sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
The binder's disappearance was so alarming that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government's work to retrieve them, the sources told the outlet.
The missing intelligence also does not appear to have been found in the more than two years since the former president left office.
It contained information the U.S. and its allies in NATO compiled on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the U.S. government's assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to aid Trump in winning the 2016 election, the sources told CNN. Because of how sensitive the intelligence was, lawmakers and congressional aides with top security clearances were only able to review the materials at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where even their work analyzing them was locked away in a safe.
The binder was last seen at the White House during the final days of Trump's presidency after he had ordered it be brought there so he could declassify a number of documents related to the FBI's Russia investigation. While the binder was in the care of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Republican aides scoured its contents to redact the most sensitive information in preparation for its declassification and public release.
Russian intelligence was only a small part of the materials in the binder, which was described as being 10 inches thick and carrying a host of information about the FBI's "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. But the raw intelligence on Russia was among the most sensitive classified documents in the binder. Top Trump administration officials made multiple efforts to prevent the former president from making the documents public.
Trump issued an order declassifying most of the contents the day before leaving office, and multiple copies of the redacted binder were created in the White House with plans to distribute them to Republicans in Congress and right-wing journalists in Washington, D.C.
Copies that were initially sent out, however, were retrieved at the behest of White House lawyers who demanded more redactions.
Meadows dashed to the Justice Department just minutes before President Joe Biden was inaugurated to hand-deliver a redacted copy of the binder for final review. Years later, the Justice Department has yet to release all of the documents despite Trump's order to declassify them. Additional copies with varying amounts of redactions found their way to the National Archives.
But an unredacted version of the binder containing the classified raw intelligence went missing in the final hours of Trump's administration, and the circumstances around its disappearance remain a mystery.
U.S. officials repeatedly declined CNN's requests to discuss government efforts to find the binder or confirm that intelligence had turned up missing.
The binder was not among the slew of classified items retrieved in last year's search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort club, a U.S. official familiar with the matter told CNN, adding that the FBI was not specifically looking for Russia-related intelligence when it obtained a search warrant to access the former president's residence last August.
The June indictment of Trump over his retention of national security information at the resort club also makes no reference to the binder or the missing Russian intelligence.
One theory, however, has come to the fore about the binder's whereabouts,
Cassidy Hutchinson, one of Meadows' top aides, testified to Congress and wrote in her memoir that she thinks Meadows pocketed the unredacted version of the binder. She said it had been kept in his safe and that she saw him leave the White House with it.
“I am almost positive it went home with Mr. Meadows,” Hutchinson told the House January 6 committee in a closed-door testimony, transcripts released last year show.
A lawyer for the former chief of staff, however, strongly denies that Meadows mishandled any classified information at the White House, saying that any suggestion that he was responsible for any classified materials' disappearance was "flat wrong."
“Mr. Meadows was keenly aware of and adhered to requirements for the proper handling of classified material, any such material that he handled or was in his possession has been treated accordingly and any suggestion that he is responsible for any missing binder or other classified information is flat wrong,” Meadows' attorney George Terwilliger told CNN in a statement. “Anyone and any entity suggesting that he is responsible for anything missing does not have facts and should exercise great care before making false allegations.”
Since Trump left office, his allies have sought out the redacted binder for public release, with some suing the Department of Justice and the National Archives earlier this year. Attorneys for the former president are now pursuing access to the classified intelligence from the 2016 election assessment as they prepare for his defense against charges stemming from attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
The missing binder lies at the center of one of the most contentious battles waged behind the scenes by then-President Trump. Despite vehement opposition from national security officials, the former president spent years working to declassify materials he said would prove his claims the FBI's investigation into his campaign's relationship with Russia was a hoax.
The binder's origins go back to 2018, when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Chairman David Nunes, R-Calif., put together a classified report claiming the Obama administration had skewed information in its assessment that Putin had tried to help Trump in the 2016 electoral race.
The GOP report criticized the intelligence community's "tradecraft" and scrutinized the highly classified information from 2016 that informed the assessment Putin and Russia attempted to aid Trump's campaign.
House Republicans brokered a deal with the CIA in which the committee brought in a safe for its documents that was then placed inside a CIA vault. The setup of the security measures prompted some officials to characterize it as a "turducken" or "safe within a safe."
Under the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI in February and March released several hundred pages of heavily redacted internal records from its Russia probe, a move that followed lawsuits from conservative groups seeking the documents from the investigation.
In a June filing aiming to dismiss Trump-allied conservative journalist John Solomon's lawsuit, the Department of Justice said the FBI's document release had fulfilled Meadows' request for a Privacy Act review, noting that it had "resulted in the posting of most of the binder" on the FBI's FOIA website.
In response, Solomon claimed the documents the FBI released were only "a small part of the binder’s contents with substantial additional redactions.”
Last July, Meadows told Solomon in an interview that he turned over the documents to the Justice Department out of an "abundance of caution."
“We gave them those declassified documents — I want to stress they were declassified documents — to do a final redaction for some of that personal information, with the instruction that they were to go ahead and disseminate those,” Meadows said. “We expected fully that they would do that, at the most a few days — but here we are a few years later.”
The CIA, FBI, National Archives and Office for the Director of National Intelligence declined CNN's request for comment for the report, as did a spokeswoman for the Senate Intelligence Committee and a lawyer for Hutchinson. A spokesman for Trump did not respond to the outlet's comment request.
Nunes, who left Congress to head Trump's media company Truth Social, mocked CNN for focusing on "secret Trump binders" in a statement responding to the outlet's questions.
