Newly declassified FBI documents show the bureau opened a full counterintelligence investigation casting President Donald Trump as a possible Russian asset just days after he fired Director James Comey in 2017, a probe that found nothing.
The White House released the memos on Wednesday alongside a previously classified annex to Special Counsel John Durham's final report. Together, the documents paint a damning picture of an FBI willing to treat a sitting president as a foreign intelligence threat based on thin justification, even as its own investigators privately doubted the premise.
The centerpiece is an FBI opening communication dated May 16, 2017, one week after Trump dismissed Comey. Codenamed "Oxferd Comma," with an unexplained misspelling of "Oxford," the investigation sought to determine whether Trump was, in the bureau's own words, "directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States and/or a violation of federal criminal statutes." The memo also stated the probe would examine whether Trump and "others yet to be named obstructed and/or conspiracy to obstruct any associated FBI investigation."
The investigation did not emerge from the rank and file. Just The News reported that FBI General Counsel James Baker and Assistant Director for Counterintelligence William Priestap approved the opening of "Oxferd Comma." Both Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were informed.
Three days later, on May 19, 2017, the lead agent on the FBI's broader Russia investigation, Deputy Assistant Director Pete Strzok, sent a text message to FBI lawyer Lisa Page that undercut the entire basis for the probe. "I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there," Strzok wrote. The bureau's own point man on Russia had doubts from the start, yet the investigation rolled forward anyway.
Rosenstein compounded the problem a week after Comey's firing by appointing Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to take over and broaden the existing "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation. That probe had launched in July 2016 after Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos reportedly suggested Russia possessed damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
Mueller's investigation ran for nearly two years. When it concluded in April 2019, it found that Russia had sought to influence the election through social media disinformation and by hacking and releasing Democratic Party emails. But the report stated plainly that the investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government." The "Oxferd Comma" memos closed on April 9, 2019, the same month Mueller wrapped up, with nothing to show for the accusation that a sitting president served a foreign power.
Attorney General William Barr later appointed John Durham to review how the FBI had launched its Russia investigation in the first place. Durham's review, which concluded in 2023, found that the bureau "lacked sufficient factual basis to open the full Crossfire Hurricane investigation" and had "exhibited bias by departing from its usual standards." That conclusion applied to the broader Russia probe, the very investigation that spawned "Oxferd Comma."
The newly declassified annex to Durham's final report adds another layer. It includes material suggesting officials were aware of a Clinton campaign plan to link Trump to Russia as a political strategy. One excerpt from the annex describes the approach bluntly: "Raising the theme of 'Putin's support for Trump' to the level of the Olympics scandal would divert the constituents' attention from the investigation of Clinton's compromised electronic correspondence."
A 2016 letter from Leonard Benardo, who worked for the Soros-founded Open Society Foundations and had business ties to Moscow dating to the 1980s, went further. Benardo wrote:
"Julie says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire."
The Durham report's appendix identifies "Julie" as appearing to be Julianne Smith, a Clinton foreign policy advisor. The identification is not confirmed, the report uses "appears to be" language, but the letter's casual reference to the FBI adding "more oil into the fire" raises uncomfortable questions about what some political operatives expected from the bureau during the 2016 campaign.
The "Oxferd Comma" probe did not operate in isolation. It sat atop a broader pattern of investigative conduct that multiple reviews have since found lacking. The FBI's surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which began in October 2016, relied heavily on the Steele dossier, an opposition research document funded by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton's presidential campaign. The Washington Free Beacon reported that FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap, the same official who approved "Oxferd Comma", acknowledged the dossier was unverified when the initial surveillance warrant was approved.
Former FBI Deputy Director McCabe later confirmed that no surveillance warrant would have been sought without the Steele dossier. FBI and Justice Department officials failed to disclose to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret federal court that approves national security wiretaps, that the dossier was funded by Clinton's campaign. The surveillance lasted a year and, by all available accounts, produced no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.
The pattern extended to internal credibility questions at the bureau's highest levels. Comey's own personal memos, released separately, showed that he vouched for McCabe's integrity and professionalism to Trump on four occasions across multiple meetings and phone calls. "Andy was a true professional and had no problem at all," Comey told Trump at a January 27 White House dinner. At a February meeting, Comey repeated the assurance: "Andy McCabe was a pro."
The Department of Justice Inspector General later referred McCabe to federal prosecutors after finding he lied to investigators or to Comey four times, three of those under oath. Trump had questioned McCabe's impartiality, pointing to $675,000 in campaign contributions McCabe's wife received from Virginia Democratic Party groups linked to Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe. Comey dismissed those concerns each time.
Comey, who served as FBI Director from 2013 until Trump fired him in May 2017, had a complicated tenure. He oversaw the launch of Crossfire Hurricane and ran the investigation into Clinton's use of private email servers. Days before the 2016 election, he sent a letter to Congress saying the FBI had discovered emails that "appear to be pertinent" to the Clinton case, a move that drew fury from Democrats at the time.
After his firing, Comey publicly defended the bureau. When House Republicans released a declassified memo detailing FBI surveillance concerns, Comey dismissed it on social media, calling it a "dishonest and misleading memo" that "wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen." He asked, "For what?"
The declassified documents now released by the White House suggest an answer to Comey's question. The memo, and others like it, exposed an FBI leadership that opened sweeping investigations on thin predicates, relied on unverified political opposition research, concealed material facts from the courts, and treated a duly elected president as a suspected foreign agent, all while its own investigators harbored private doubts about the evidence.
Trump's administration initially cited Comey's handling of the Clinton email investigation as the reason for his dismissal. The FBI responded by opening "Oxferd Comma" within days. The administration ordered the declassification of key Russia-related documents, including FISA applications, FBI interview reports, and unredacted text messages from senior officials like Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, and DOJ official Bruce Ohr. Republican lawmakers had argued the documents would reveal bias within the FBI and DOJ. The newly released memos suggest those lawmakers were right.
Fox News Digital reported that it reached out to the White House for additional comment on Wednesday. The declassified memos and annex material are now public, adding to a record that Durham, Mueller, and multiple congressional investigations have built over nearly a decade.
The full scope of what the FBI set in motion in May 2017 is now clearer than ever. A bureau that opened a counterintelligence case against the president of the United States, labeling him a potential asset of a hostile foreign government, did so on the same week its lead investigator privately admitted he sensed "no big there there." Senior leadership approved the probe. The surveillance court was kept in the dark about the political origins of key evidence. And when the investigations finally closed, they confirmed what the doubters inside the bureau already suspected.
Durham called it bias. The memos call it something worse: an institution that aimed the full weight of federal law enforcement at a president, ran the investigation for two years, came up empty, and never fully accounted for how it started.
When the most powerful investigative agency in the country treats a presidential personnel decision as evidence of treason, the problem is not the president who made the decision, it is the agency that lost the ability to tell the difference between politics and national security.
