White House declassifies FBI probe into Trump as possible Russian asset

The White House declassified material saying the FBI opened an inquiry into whether Donald Trump was acting as a Russian asset after he fired James Comey, while an administration official said the theory was not backed up by evidence. The release turns a long-sealed counterintelligence step into a fresh political weapon in Trump’s campaign to recast the Russia investigation as a partisan operation.

The FBI probe was codenamed Oxford Comma and began in the immediate aftermath of Comey’s removal in May 2017. Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017, even as Comey had been leading the bureau’s Russia investigation, a move that set off a political firestorm in Washington. The newly declassified pages do not establish that Trump was working for Moscow; they show that investigators opened the inquiry and were assessing a theory that remains disputed.

The suspicion that the FBI had opened a secret inquiry into whether Trump was covertly aligned with Russia surfaced publicly in January 2019, when The New York Times reported on the matter. By then, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III had already completed the Russia investigation and submitted his report in March 2019. Attorney General William P. Barr then made the report public in April 2019, and its findings detailed Russian interference in the 2016 election while also examining obstruction issues tied to Comey’s firing.

Trump has repeatedly used declassification to push back on the Russia probe’s findings. Hours before leaving office in January 2021, he ordered the declassification of a binder of Russia-probe documents. In September 2018, he also ordered release of additional Russia-related materials, including pages dealing with Carter Page’s links to the Russian government and alleged ties to Russian intelligence services.

The FBI and the Justice Department had already faced outside scrutiny over their Russia-related decisions before this latest release. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General issued a review in June 2018 of FBI and DOJ actions in the run-up to the 2016 election, adding another official record to a fight that has stretched across multiple investigations, document releases, and political claims. The new declassification adds to that record, but it does not settle the central question Trump’s allies want answered: whether the inquiry itself was justified, or whether it has become part of the president’s broader effort to rewrite the history of the Russia case.