Newly declassified FBI documents show the bureau opened a criminal investigation codenamed "Oxferd Comma" against President Donald Trump just days after he fired Director James Comey, a probe that produced no charges and collapsed under the weight of its own baseless premise.
The FBI's counterintelligence division launched the full investigation on May 16, 2017, exactly one week after Trump dismissed Comey. The opening memo, approved by then-FBI General Counsel James Baker and Assistant Director for Counterintelligence William Priestap, alleged that Trump "may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation." The White House Government Transparency Task Force, chaired by John Solomon, identified and declassified the memos, which Solomon reported on in a piece written for the White House website.
The investigation treated the president's firing of his own FBI director, a power squarely within Article II authority, as evidence of a possible criminal conspiracy with a foreign government. Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were both advised of the probe. Rosenstein then appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller, setting off a nearly two-year investigation that consumed Washington, paralyzed policy debates, and ultimately failed to substantiate any collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Oxferd Comma was closed on April 9, 2019, a few weeks after Mueller's probe concluded. No charges were filed against Trump. The closing memo noted simply that the special counsel had "provided the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining his prosecution and declination decisions."
The declassified record does not show an agency carefully following the evidence. It shows an agency that pressed forward despite persistent internal skepticism.
Three days after Oxferd Comma opened, Pete Strzok, then the deputy assistant director who had led the original Crossfire Hurricane case, texted FBI special counsel Lisa Page with a blunt admission:
"I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there."
Strzok was the lead agent on the collusion case. If he had doubts on May 19, 2017, it raises an obvious question: what factual basis justified opening a full criminal investigation against a sitting president three days earlier?
Special Agent William Barnett, who also worked the case, was even more direct. His interview summary, released in 2020, stated flatly that he "still did not see any evidence of collusion between the TRUMP Campaign and the Russian Government." Barnett told DOJ interviewers that the investigation felt like an effort to "get Trump."
Barnett described the atmosphere inside the probe in terms that should alarm anyone who expects federal law enforcement to operate on evidence rather than assumptions. He and other agents, he said, joked about how the investigation could be turned into a board game they called "Collusion Clue":
"In the hypothetical game, investigators are able to choose any character conducting any activity, in any location, and pair this individual with another character and interpret it as evidence of collusion."
That is not how a legitimate criminal investigation works. It is how a conclusion in search of evidence works.
The declassified documents reach back further than May 2017. They trace the origins of the collusion narrative itself, and those origins point not to Moscow but to the Clinton campaign.
CIA Director John Brennan's handwritten notes show he personally briefed President Barack Obama on or about July 26, 2016, regarding U.S. intelligence that had intercepted a remarkable piece of information. Brennan's notes summarize the intercept: Hillary Clinton had allegedly "approved... a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service."
Days later, on August 3, 2016, just four days after the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane probe in late July, Brennan convened a White House briefing. Present were Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Director of National Intelligence Clapper, FBI Director Comey, and other senior officials. A declassified annex to a DOJ report, released by Chairman Grassley, confirmed the meeting's scope:
"On August 3, 2016, during a meeting at the White House, CIA Director Brennan briefed President Obama, Vice President Biden, DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey, and other U.S. officials regarding Russian interference efforts as well as the T1 intelligence received concerning the referenced plan by the Clinton campaign."
So the Obama administration's top intelligence and law enforcement officials knew, before the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was even two weeks old, that the Clinton campaign had hatched a plan to tie Trump to Russian interference. The FBI proceeded anyway, and within months was relying on the Steele dossier, a document paid for by the Clinton campaign's law firm, as a central pillar of its investigation.
By early 2017, the FBI had evaluated every statement in the Steele dossier on an internal analytical spreadsheet. The bureau's own conclusion: some claims were provably false, and most others were either internet rumors or unable to be corroborated.
The dossier's primary subsource, Igor Danchenko, made matters worse. In a February 2017 FBI interview, Danchenko claimed some of the information attributed to him in the dossier was "simply hearsay." A September 24, 2020 letter from the Attorney General to Chairman Graham disclosed that Danchenko had been suspected for years of being a Russian asset himself.
Consider the irony the documents lay bare: the FBI opened a probe alleging the president of the United States was a Russian asset, relying in part on a dossier whose own primary source was suspected of being a Russian asset, and whose claims the bureau's analysts had already found to be unsubstantiated or false.
The pattern extended beyond Trump himself. Retired General Mike Flynn, then the incoming national security adviser, was cleared by the FBI on January 4, 2017. The closing memo stated plainly: "No derogatory information was reported back to the FBI."
Yet after being cleared, Flynn was invited to an FBI interview, and subsequently charged with making false statements during that conversation. Priestap's own handwritten notes from the time reveal the mindset driving the encounter:
"What's our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?"
That question, written by the FBI's own counterintelligence chief, speaks for itself. The goal was not to find the truth. The goal was to manufacture a case.
Special Counsel John Durham, whose report the Biden Justice Department released in 2023, concluded that there was no basis for the FBI to open the original Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion in the first place. The DOJ's own independent inspector general separately concluded that Comey "violated long-standing department practice and protocol" in his handling of the Clinton email investigation, the same Comey whose firing the FBI used as the predicate for Oxferd Comma.
The opening EC for Oxferd Comma described the investigation as "the least intrusive method to address the serious national security risk posed by the activities alleged." A full criminal investigation of a sitting president, opened on the basis of his exercise of a constitutional power, supported by a dossier the bureau knew was unreliable, driven by agents who privately admitted they saw no evidence, was the "least intrusive method" the FBI could devise.
Federal prosecutors in Fort Pierce, Florida, are now reportedly investigating whether the FBI, DOJ, and intelligence agencies engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Trump and his supporters. The declassified Oxferd Comma memos give those prosecutors plenty to work with.
When a government agency can open a criminal probe against a president for exercising his own authority, based on opposition research it knew was garbage, the problem is not one bad investigation. It is an institution that lost its way, and the Americans who paid the price deserve a full accounting.
