In 2018, Kash Patel, for all intents and purposes, was a nobody. He was a young House Intelligence Committee investigator working for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA). He delivered a four-page memo alleging that the FBI had lied to the FISA court to spy on Trump’s campaign.
The memo went nuclear, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) put out a follow-up memo claiming that the Patel memo presented by Nunes was "rife with factual inaccuracies." The media, of course, bought into the Schiff narrative without investigating a single line, labeling it as a political hit job.
The FBI called the report dangerous.
While the report was far from perfect, 18 months after it was published, the Justice Department’s Inspector General found that it was Schiff’s memo that was filled with lies, not the one written by Patel.
Fast forward five more years, and now Patel is calling the shots at the FBI. This is the same agency that only years before had spied on him, subpoenaed his phone records, and spent years dismissing his initial memo.
Not long after Patel entered the Hoover Building as the new director of the FBI, he found a hidden room. This was a room that was not even in the building’s blueprints. It was never meant to be found, and for good reason. In that room, Patel found documents from the very investigation he had exposed as a complete and utter fraud.
The tables have turned. The agency that once tried to discredit Patel is now under his thumb. And what he just exposed is going to rock our entire political and justice systems.
The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).
The court operates in complete secrecy. There is no opposing counsel. There is no public record. All we have is the government’s word that the subject of the warrant is a foreign agent and that all evidence is accurate and vetted.
With this power, one would think that agency heads and the judges overseeing the court would ensure every i is dotted and every t is crossed, but we are about to show you that is not the case.
The FBI has very strict guidelines for FISA warrants, insisting that all applications are "scrupulously accurate.”
Yet, when former FBI Director James Comey signed off on the warrants during the Russian collusion investigation, he assumed the agents had followed all procedures, according to Politico. Much in the same way that Judge James Boasberg assumed the information presented by the agents was truthful.
That is a lot of faith, given the severe nature of these warrants and the invasion of privacy that takes place if the information is not accurate.
Carter Page, a former Trump aide, was the initial subject of the FISA warrants during Operation Crossfire Hurricane.
The first FISA warrant was obtained on October 21, 2016, to surveil Page, who had served as a campaign adviser for the Trump presidential campaign.
During the IG’s investigation, an FBI official told Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz that the Steele Dossier had "pushed the FISA proposal over the line.”
As we now know, this dossier was opposition research on Donald Trump, written by Christopher Steele, commissioned by Fusion GPS, and eventually funded by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The FBI did not disclose that Steele had an ax to grind with Trump. The FBI did not disclose that Trump’s political opponents had funded the dossier. The FBI did not disclose that Steele was leaking information to the media.
The dossier was never verified, and, as I outlined in my deep dive on former CIA Director John Brennan (click here to read that report), the decision makers knew this and pushed forward with the dossier anyway.
The warrant was renewed on three separate occasions in 2017, all of which should have required new evidence to be presented to justify the new warrants.
Four FISA warrants that used a politically charged dossier funded by Trump’s opposition. Millions of taxpayer dollars were spent investigating Carter Page, and no charges were ever filed.
On February 2, 2018, Rep. Devin Nunes released his memo, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The primary author of the memo was Kash Patel, who was serving as the Chief Investigator for the House Intelligence Committee, which was chaired by Nunes at the time.
Both the DOJ and FBI objected to the release of the memo, as noted above.
At its core, the memo claimed the FBI relied on the Steele dossier, which was supplied by the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign, as well as the failure to disclose this information to the FISA court, so that it could spy on a presidential campaign.
On February 4, 2018, Schiff appeared on ABC News’ “This Week,” stating:
"The investigation didn't begin with Carter Page, it actually began with George Papadopoulos, someone who was a foreign policy advisor for candidate Trump and someone who was meeting secretly with the Russians and talking about the stolen Clinton emails."
According to a CBS News report, he later added:
"Even this very flawed memo demonstrates what the origin of the investigation was and that origin involved the issue of collusion.”
He formally responded with a memo of his own on February 24, 2018, claiming that the memo was flawed, inaccurate, and that Nunes would "protect the President at any cost.”
He further claimed that the warrant request was based on "compelling evidence and probable cause,” adding that the FBI would have been negligent had it not applied for a FISA warrant.
Just as the media would later do with the Hunter Biden laptop story, it brushed aside any thought of investigating this on its own and swallowed Schiff’s version of the story in full. The Nunes memo was called a “dud,” a complete and utter failure, and nothing more than a partisan hit job.
Now, the Patel memo was far from perfect, as there were definitely some inaccuracies, but the core of the memo held up under the IG investigation. Some examples would be a mischaracterization of the briefing given to Trump by Comey, as well as the Ohr timeline. This was sloppy on Patel’s part, as the facts would clearly become available. Schiff’s dismissal of the core elements, however, did not hold up under scrutiny.
On December 9, 2019, IG Horowitz released his report on Operation Crossfire Hurricane, finding 17 significant inaccuracies and errors in the FISA applications.
The problems started with the first FISA application, which had seven errors, with another 10 errors found by the time the fourth application was submitted.
His office examined more than one million documents, as well as conducting more than 170 interviews with more than 100 witnesses.
Horowitz ripped the FBI, saying that it had "failed to meet the basic obligation" that FISA applications be "scrupulously accurate." He stated that the 17 errors could be attributed to pure incompetence, but he also understood why people would question that. Horowitz, according to a BBC report, under questioning, noted:
"We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations.”
File that for later in this report when you read what John Durham found in his probe.
Comey, according to an NBC News report, would admit:
"Horowitz was right, I was wrong. I was overconfident as director in our procedures."
Out of all of this, the only person to face any type of accountability was a low-level FBI attorney, Kevin Clinesmith. Even so, he received only probation, by, wait for it… Judge Boasberg, who was working on the FISA court at the time the warrants were issued.
Clinesmith altered an email during the fourth renewal, saying that Page was “not a source” for the CIA (he was an operational contact from 2008 to 2013). This was exculpatory evidence that could have shut the investigation down, and he purposely manipulated it.
The DOJ later admitted the warrant lacked probable cause, and in January 2020, the DOJ ruled that two of the four warrants were invalid.
As you can see from the table below, what the American people were being told versus what was true were in two different zip codes:
| What Schiff Said (2018) | What the Record Showed |
|---|---|
| The Nunes memo is "rife with factual inaccuracies" and was "meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI." | Horowitz confirmed Nunes's core claims on the dossier's role and the FBI's disclosure failures. The Washington Examiner concluded: "Nunes was right — for the most part." The Wall Street Journal's editorial board demanded Nunes be owed an apology. |
| The FBI did not omit information about who funded the Steele dossier from the FISA application. | Horowitz found the FBI failed to disclose the dossier's political funding to the FISA court — one of 17 documented errors and omissions across all four applications. |
| The warrant request was based on "compelling evidence and probable cause." | Two of the four FISA warrants were later declared invalid by the Department of Justice. Judge Boasberg ruled the surveillance collected against Carter Page lacked a legal basis. |
| The Steele dossier did not drive the decision to investigate Trump or seek the FISA warrant. | Horowitz found the dossier played a "central and essential role" in the FISA application. FBI officials told investigators the dossier "pushed the FISA proposal over the line" in establishing probable cause. |
| The FBI "would have been negligent" had it not used FISA surveillance against Page. | An FBI attorney pled guilty to criminally altering a government document to sustain that same surveillance. The man surveilled — Carter Page — was never charged with a crime. |
| The Democratic counter-memo "fully addresses the omissions and distortions" in the Nunes document. | Durham's 2023 Special Counsel report concluded the FBI should not have launched a full investigation at all — that it possessed no actual evidence of collusion at the time it opened Crossfire Hurricane. |
| The Nunes memo was not without its own errors — it mischaracterized the timeline of Comey's briefing of Trump and overstated the significance of the Ohr meetings. Those errors mattered. But the core claims — that the FBI used Clinton-funded opposition research as the basis for a FISA warrant, and failed to disclose its political origins to the court — were confirmed by a federal Inspector General, a Special Counsel, and the FISA court itself. Adam Schiff called those claims lies. The documented record tells a different story.
Sources: Horowitz IG Report (DOJ OIG, December 9, 2019); Durham Special Counsel Report (May 15, 2023); DOJ press release on Clinesmith guilty plea (August 2020); PBS NewsHour (Schiff interview, February 3, 2018); House Intelligence Committee Democrats press release (January 24, 2018); The Hill (April 2018); Washington Examiner; Just Security. |
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As a direct result of what Horowitz found, AG Barr appointed John Durham as special counsel to investigate the investigation itself, and on May 12, 2023, his more than 300-page report found that Operation Crossfire Hurricane never should have been launched in the first place.
His report stated:
"Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation."
He said the FBI had launched its investigation on "raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” a far cry from how the agency had conducted operations in the past.
He went on to say that the agency "did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations" in the Steele dossier.
Additionally, Durham found that the FBI had "discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship.”
One of the more damning observations was that the investigation found that some personnel assigned to the investigation had a "predisposition to open an investigation into Trump.” This is contrary to the finding by Horowitz, who stated there was no political bias.
Anyone who read the report in full could see this was a massive rebuke of the agency, yet the media dismissed the report, saying it had failed to deliver, calling it a “nothingburger” and a “flop.”
During an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on his podcast, “Hang Out with Sean Hannity,” Dan Bongino, the former Deputy Director of the FBI, dropped the bombshell saying that they had found the “keys to the kingdom” on Crossfire.
He later added:
"I thought I knew Russiagate. It was like 10 times worse."
A week later, Kash Patel dropped the real bombshell, stating:
"It took me two years of my life to prove the following: that a political party in the United States of America in the 21st century would go overseas and hire some bogus intelligence asset to manufacture fraudulent, fake, unverified information, funnel that to not just the intelligence community, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
He continued:
"And then take those packaged lies that they had paid for with campaign finance funds and go into a secret surveillance court and illegally spy on your opponent to be the president of the United States."
When Patel found the hidden room, it contained burn bags filled with documents that had not yet been destroyed. This was evidence that was never meant to be found.
Among the contents were materials from Crossfire Hurricane and the classified annex to Durham’s report. This was all the intelligence that had been reviewed by Durham but not made public. (Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is currently working to release the information.)
Fox News Digital reported that there were credible foreign sources that stated the FBI would help spread the Trump-Russia collusion narrative before the investigation had ever been launched.
Patel later observed:
"I can't believe this happened in the United States. It wasn't just that it happened — it was that so many people knew about it."
The paper trail of the investigation is outlined in the table below:
| Document / Event | Source | Date | What It Proves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steele dossier funded by Clinton campaign and DNC | FEC records; Horowitz IG Report | 2016–2019 | Political opposition research paid for by Trump's opponents was used as probable cause to obtain secret surveillance warrants against a rival presidential campaign. |
| Dossier "pushed the FISA proposal over the line" | Horowitz IG Report — FBI officials' own words | Dec. 2019 | FBI leadership knew the unverified, politically funded dossier was the deciding factor in obtaining the warrant — and proceeded anyway without disclosing its origins to the court. |
| 17 significant errors and omissions across all four FISA applications | Horowitz IG Report | Dec. 2019 | The FBI violated its own "scrupulously accurate" standard in every single application — 7 errors in the first warrant, compounding to 17 by the final renewal. Horowitz said it would be "fair" to wonder how 17 events could be "purely incompetence." |
| Kevin Clinesmith guilty plea — doctored CIA email | DOJ; Durham prosecution | Aug. 2020 | An FBI attorney criminally altered a CIA email to hide Carter Page's exculpatory history as a U.S. intelligence source — removing the one fact that provided an innocent explanation for his Russian contacts. He received probation. |
| Two FISA warrants declared invalid | DOJ; Judge Boasberg | Jan. 2020 | The court that issued the warrants ruled that two of them were obtained without legal basis. The surveillance of Carter Page was declared unlawful by the same institution the FBI had deceived to obtain it. |
| Carter Page never charged with a crime | Federal court record | — | The man the FBI surveilled for nearly a year — the man whose CIA history was doctored out of the record — was innocent of the offense alleged. He was never indicted, never tried, never convicted. |
| Durham: "no actual evidence of collusion" at investigation's start | Durham Special Counsel Report | May 2023 | The FBI opened a full counterintelligence investigation — the most serious designation available — without the evidence required to justify it. This was a "noticeable departure" from how the bureau handled comparable matters involving other campaigns. |
| Durham: FBI showed "predisposition" against Trump | Durham Special Counsel Report | May 2023 | Among key personnel, Durham found a predisposition to open an investigation into Trump — and documented that the FBI "discounted or willfully ignored" evidence that did not support the collusion narrative. |
| Hidden burn bag room — off building blueprints | Patel; Fox News Digital | 2025–2026 | FBI Director Patel discovered a room inside FBI headquarters that did not appear on building blueprints, filled with burn bags containing thousands of Crossfire Hurricane documents. The room did not officially exist. Someone put those documents there. |
| Classified Durham annex: foreign sources predicted FBI's role | Sources familiar with annex; Fox News Digital | 2026 | According to sources familiar with the contents, the U.S. intelligence community had credible foreign sources indicating the FBI would play a role in spreading the Trump-Russia collusion narrative — before Crossfire Hurricane was ever launched. The annex is being declassified for transmission to Senate Judiciary Chairman Grassley. |
| Every item in this table comes from a government document, a federal guilty plea, a court ruling, or sourced reporting. This is not a theory. It is a record. The FBI used Clinton-funded opposition research to obtain secret warrants, doctored evidence to sustain them, launched a full investigation without the evidence required to justify it, and stashed the paper trail in burn bags in a room that wasn't on the map. One person was convicted. He received probation.
Sources: Horowitz IG Report (DOJ OIG, December 9, 2019); Durham Special Counsel Report (May 15, 2023); DOJ press release on Clinesmith guilty plea (August 2020); FEC enforcement records; Fox News Digital; NPR; CBS News; NBC News; CNN; Washington Examiner; Just Security; Cornell Law (50 U.S.C. §§ 1801–1885c). |
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In 2018, this circle opened with the Nunes memo, setting off a series of events that would polarize the country for years. It was the anchor claim by Donald Trump that the DOJ had been weaponized against him.
John Durham said the investigation never should have happened. Two of the FISA warrants have been deemed invalid.
Yet, even with all the proof, the media and Democrats, some to this day, dismiss the facts and continue to claim that Trump was colluding with the Russians.
Things are different now, however, as the burn bags have changed everything.
This is not about relitigating what happened in 2016. This is about proving how dangerous a federal agency can be when it abuses a trust given to it by a secret court, using documents funded by the subject’s political enemies, then not only alters evidence but also tries to destroy it.
We can only be thankful that the effort to destroy the evidence was just as sloppy as the investigation itself.
The question is no longer about what happened… that has already been answered, and any remaining questions will be answered by the contents of those burn bags.
One question left to be answered is a question we have all been asking since the IG report was released: Will someone of significance ever be held accountable?
So far, only a low-level attorney was served up, and he never saw a day in prison.
When the government can abuse the system to invade our privacy, be caught, and not a single person goes to jail for that violation of that trust, not to mention the law, the system is clearly broken.
That leaves us with one more question: will this administration dare to fix it?
