Trapper Keepers: Raiders of the Lost Binder

Kash Patel & John Solomon, authorized to access Trump's presidential records, want documents relating to the FBI's Russia investigation. What are they really after, and why?

On January 19, 2021, in the last hours of his presidency, Donald Trump wrote a memorandum to the Attorney General and the Directors of National Intelligence and the CIA, in which he announced that the “binder of materials” received from the FBI via the DOJ a month prior was hereby “declassified to the maximum extent possible.”

This was less than a week after Trump’s second impeachment—just 13 days after his MAGA horde besieged the Capitol in a failed attempt to thwart the peaceful transition of power. The scaffolding used by the insurrectionists had been replaced, in anticipation of the inauguration of Joe Biden that took place at noon the next day. An upside-down U.S. flag was flying in front of the Alito household, in support of the coup plotters. Somewhere, presumably, Ginni Thomas was still seething about the Biden crime family and barges to Gitmo. That very day, the covid-19 death toll surpassed 400,000 in the United States—a number boosted by the outgoing president’s gross negligence in managing the national pandemic response.

Trump’s presidential Sharpie was busy that morning. On January 19, 2021, he issued pardons for, among many others: Steve Bannon, Elliott Broidy, Jeanine Pirro’s ex-husband Alex, and the disgraced art dealer Helly Nahmad, who had run an illegal gambling operation at Trump Tower. The soon-to-be FPOTUS was also occupied with spiriting away all those boxes of top secret documents that would later turn up in the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.

But the documents he wanted most to take with him out the door—the ones in the “binder of materials”—remained beyond the grasp of his short fingers. This was no ordinary binder, you see. These were documents, specific documents, relating to “Crossfire Hurricane”—the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s Russia ties.

“Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public,” Trump wrote in the January 19 memo. “I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.” And then: “I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible.”

In a bombshell 2023 CNN report, titled “The Mystery of the Missing Binder: How a Collection of Raw Russian Intelligence Disappeared Under Trump,” the reporting team of Jeremy Herb, Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, Evan Perez, and Zachary Cohen explained that the ten-inch-thick binder

contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.

The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.

On December 30, 2020—three weeks before the end of Trump’s presidency—the binder was delivered by the DOJ to the White House, where it lived in a safe in the office of Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. His assistant, Cassidy Hutchinson, aware of its significance, put it there for safekeeping.

After Trump gave the eleventh-hour go-ahead to declassify the redacted documents, copies of the “binder of materials” were hurriedly made. The then-president’s plan, according to CNN, was to hand out copies to various members of Congress and the press who were sympathetic to Trump—including the conspiracy-peddling “journalist” John Solomon, who says he was invited by Meadows to the White House the night before Biden’s inauguration and had made plans to scan and publish the materials. It had all the hallmarks of a Wikileaks-style operation: a document dump disguised as journalism.

But Trump’s plans were thwarted. The copies of the binder documents were retrieved almost immediately, when White House attorneys freaked out about the possibility of the materials being out in the wild before a more fine-tooth-comb security review. There were grave national security concerns at the Bureau, as CNN discovered:

“Any further declassification would reveal sensitive intelligence collection techniques, damage foreign partner relations, jeopardize United States Intelligence Community equities, potentially violate court orders limiting the dissemination of FISA information … (and) endanger confidential human sources,” a top FBI official wrote to White House officials, according to a source who read portions of the letter to CNN.

It beggars belief that Trump was concerned one iota about potential national security threats. Even so, the lawyers managed somehow to keep the “Crossfire Hurricane” genie in the bottle—or, to be more accurate, in a Whole Foods shopping bag, which is where the Secret Service agent who collected it put it, according to Hutchinson.

On the morning of January 20, with minutes left in Trump’s term, Meadows wrote a memo to the DOJ: “I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice (including all that appear to have a potential to raise privacy concerns) with the instruction that the Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied.” Literally the last thing Meadows did on his way out the door, it appears, was to convey a copy of the binder to the Justice Department.

The original binder? It vanished. It was not among the stolen classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. It was not in the Chief of Staff’s safe the morning of January 20; Hutchinson believes she saw Meadows leave that night with it tucked under his arm, but Meadows, through his attorney, vehemently denies this.

In the three-and-a-half years since Trump left office, the missing “binder of materials” has not been found.

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The National Archives and Records Administration, NARA for short, is the federal agency charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records—the country’s record-keeper. This includes presidential records, which should not be a surprise, considering that NARA was created by FDR for that purpose.

On June 19, 2022—a few months before the midterm elections; well into Biden’s term of office—FPOTUS Trump wrote a letter to Debra Steidel Wall, the Acting Archivist of the United States and, at the time, the head of NARA, designating two loyalists, Kashyap “Kash” Patel and the aforementioned John Solomon, as his representatives “for access to Presidential records of [his] administration.”

It is not unusual for a former president to designate representatives to deal with his presidential records, which comprise a vast trove of documents. Someone has to take on that enormous responsibility. There are two peculiar things about Trump’s choices, however. First, the timing is odd; he installed his new designates not that long after leaving office. Why wait? Why did he not just designate them while he was still POTUS?

But even stranger—fishier, we might reasonably say—are the two men he chose to be his representatives. Barack Obama’s records designate was Anita Decker Breckenridge. This is what Politico wrote about her on January 7, 2017:

Breckenridge, currently deputy White House chief of staff for operations, started out as a driver and secretary for Obama in 2003, when he was a state senator. She helped with his 2004 U.S. Senate bid, managed many of his offices in Illinois after he won that job and aided in organizing his 2007 announcement of his campaign for the presidency.

After Obama won, Breckenridge served as chief of staff at the National Endowment for the Arts. Obama brought her to the White House in 2011 to serve as his personal secretary. In 2014, she was promoted to the deputy chief of staff post, which includes regularly traveling with the president and briefing him on natural and man-made disasters.

At the time, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough described Breckenridge as “someone who not only has the complete trust of the president but has given him candid counsel for years.”

Breckenridge was a combination of Mrs. Landingham and C.J. Cregg—a logical and responsible choice for such an important job. Trump’s selections? Not so much.

Kash Patel was the chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller— who on January 4, 2021, sent a bizarre memo to the Secretary of the Army basically ordering that the National Guard fuck off on January 6. Before that, he worked for another “Acting”—which is to say, unconfirmed by the Senate—official, Ric Grenell, the interim Director of National Intelligence. Per the National Security Counsel advisor Fiona Hill, Patel “was improperly becoming involved in Ukraine policy and was sending information to Mr. Trump,” mucking up the works.

And before that, Patel was an aide to Devin Nunes, then the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. It was while working for Nunes that Patel first made a name for himself, coming up with the talking points Trump and his MAGA allies would use to attempt to discredit Trump/Russia—which, contrary to Patel’s assertions, was very much real. As the (conservative) Washington Times reported,

In 2017-18…[a]s a then-low key House investigator, Mr. Patel cracked the code: Democrats had paid Mr. Steele for his discredited narrative and the FBI used it to convince judges to approve a year’s worth of wiretaps on a Trump volunteer. The dossier also played a role the overall FBI “Crossfire Hurricane” probe by falsely [sic] claiming there was an “extensive” Trump-Kremlin conspiracy.

All Patel’s (debunked) version of events did was confuse the American people, make Christopher Steele’s life miserable, and weaken our national security—which did not stop him from [checks notes] writing “the worst children’s book of all time” about it. Since Trump left office, Patel has spent his time filing frivolous lawsuits, making veiled threats of MAGA political vengeance on Steve Bannon’s podcast, and sitting on the Board of Directors of Trump Media & Technology Group with his old boss Devin Nunes.

But Patel, at least, worked in government and had some meaningful interaction with Trump. While working for Grenell, for example, he provided the President’s Daily Briefing. He also held a TS/INC security clearance, although—and this is funny in a Keystone Cops kind of way—NARA was not able to confirm this.

John Solomon is another story. Once upon a time, he was the assistant chief of AP’s Washington bureau; his superior, the formidable Sandy Johnson, was the only decision-maker in the country who refused to call the 2000 election for Gore on Election Night, refusing to budge despite enormous pressure from her own supervisors to do so. But that was decades ago. He long ago turned his back on proper journalism, pushing so many bogus stories that both his colleagues at The Hill and the Fox News research team warned their executives not to trust him. He was the “journalist” of choice when Rudy Giuliani was in Ukraine trying to manufacture dirt on Hunter Biden. As the Daily Beast reported in 2019, when Solomon was still working for The Hill:

Over the past several months, and with the benefit of substantial airtime from Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity, Solomon has peddled a series of Ukraine-based conspiracy theories and allegations that have primarily taken aim at two of Trumpworld’s biggest targets: Biden and Hillary Clinton.

In the process, his questionable reporting, which often seems specifically tailored to stoke the flames of right-wing paranoia, has enraged many of his colleagues at The Hill who have for years seen his tactics and reporting as overtly ideological, convoluted, and often lacking in crucial context….

And yet even with his own employer openly downplaying the “reporting” aspect of his work, Solomon emerged this year as a key figure in jump-starting Team Trump’s Ukraine-Biden narrative that may now lead to impeachment. 

In Solomon’s March 20 interview with Yuriy Lutsenko, the then-Ukrainian prosecutor general made a series of wild claims, including accusing Biden of pressuring the then-Ukrainian president in 2016 to fire the country’s top prosecutor—at the time, Viktor Shokin—to squash an investigation into a Ukrainian gas company connected to Hunter Biden. (Lutsenko would later retract some of the claims made to Solomon, eventually walking back his claims of wrongdoing by the Bidens, ultimately concluding: “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws.”)

This specific interview with Solomon was featured in a U.S. government whistleblower’s complaint as one of the key circumstances that eventually led to Trump’s now-infamous request on a July 25 call with the Ukrainian president. Solomon also promoted the interview and its unfounded claims on Hannity’s show later that evening, prompting an approving tweet from the president.

You might also recognize Solomon’s name from the new MSNBC documentary “From Russia With Lev,” in which Lev Parnas, who was then part of Giuliani’s team, spills the beans on what really happened in Ukraine.

In short, John Solomon is a MAGA hack, widely seen as a fraud by real journalists—even ones working at conservative outlets. As Pro Publica reports, he helped launch the bogus Ukraine conspiracy that led to Trump’s first impeachment. (Trump, for his part, once remarked that Solomon should win the Pulitzer Prize.)

Why did Trump install this odd couple as his records representatives? Had Patel and Solomon even worked together in any meaningful capacity before being tasked with Trump to track down and secure the “binder of materials?” Beyond both of them appearing in the Amanda Milius documentary The Plot Against the President, I have found few connections between these two MAGA loyalists. What prompted FPOTUS to pick this pair to do the job? Was this the Beltway Bizarro World equivalent of Frodo and Samwise Gamgee being trusted with the Ring of Sauron? Why these two specifically?

Far be it for me to guess what is on Trump’s mind, but I can speculate. The answer lies in what Patel and Solomon have in common. Both possess an elite talent for peddling false narratives, half-truths, bad takes, conspiracy theories, Kremlin deza, and unadulterated horseshit—whatever it takes to make Donald Trump look like the victim of some nefarious “Deep State” plot rather than the Putin-fluffing traitor that he is. I mean, Salon once called Patel a “disinformation wizard,” which in two words articulates what he does and how good he is at it. And Giuliani worked with Solomon for a reason. Who better to launch the “binder of materials” into the discourse than MAGA’s finest spin doctors? That is my read on it, in any case.

What we know for sure is that Patel and Solomon were not chosen for their expert knowledge of how federal records are kept, as would become obvious in the months that followed.

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In April of 2019, Robert Mueller released the Mueller Report, a damning account of Donald Trump’s traitorousness. This thick volume confirmed what I had covered in my 2018 book Dirty Rubles: Yes, the Trump people and the Putin people communicated—a lot!—and yes, the latter wanted Donald to win the White House. The Mueller Report was nothing less than a blueprint for impeachment. There is no way an objective human could read it and not conclude that Donald Trump had, at a minimum, obstructed justice any number of times.

A few days before the report was released, Bill Barr, then the Attorney General, sent a letter to members of Congress in which he misrepresented the findings in the Mueller Report. Just before the release of the Report, he gave a press conference in which he doubled down:

As the Special Counsel’s report makes clear, the Russian government sought to interfere in our election. But thanks to the Special Counsel’s thorough investigation, we now know that the Russian operatives who perpetrated these schemes did not have the cooperation of President Trump or the Trump campaign—or the knowing assistance of any other Americans for that matter. That is something that all Americans can and should be grateful to have confirmed…

Put another way, the Special Counsel found no “collusion” by any Americans in the IRA’s illegal activity.

“Collusion” is a very specific legal term that has more to do with Andre Dawson not getting a substantial contract offer to play major league baseball in 1985 than anything Trump’s people were doing in 2016. So MAGA smartly glommed onto that word. “No collusion,” said Bill Barr. “Total exoneration,” said Trump, even though Mueller flat-out says the opposite: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

And so the mendacious AG, in one four-page letter and a single press conference, defused the ticking Mueller Report time-bomb. This demonstrated something Trump has long known: The first narrative is usually the prevailing narrative, even if the first narrative is bullshit. Or, as Winston Churchill once put it, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

With the template firmly established by Bill Barr, Trump’s minions likely intended to give the “binder of materials” the same treatment—or so I speculate. One of the many documents in said binder was the notes taken by the FBI when they interviewed Christopher Steele, a major figure in Patel’s bogus alternative history of the origins of “Crossfire Hurricane.” From the looks of things—and to be clear, this is my speculation—the plan was to dump the huge trove of documents along with a loud, indignant narrative in which Trump is cast as the victim of yet another “Deep State” conspiracy. The MAGA strategists likely figured that most journalists would not bother to comb through the materials in the binder, and would simply parrot whatever Patel and Solomon said. Fox News, Newsmax and the like would have a field day.

Fortunately for the American people, neither Patel nor Solomon nor Trump have the slightest understanding of how national records are kept.

Immediately after being designated Trump’s representatives, Solomon contacted Gary M. Stern, NARA’s chief counsel, to request the “binder of documents.” Stern explained, quite kindly in my view, how the process of requesting documents works, how long it might take, and why. Much of this information is freely available on NARA’s website. To wit:

With the exception of records that have been reviewed and released to the public, all access to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records is gained by requesting specific case files through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). If you do not know the file number(s) pertinent to your research, you will have to do a bit of work before filing a FOIA request with the National Archives. While some records have been legally transferred (accessioned) to the National Archives, NARA has not yet accessioned the index to those records. Before NARA staff can locate records responsive to your inquiry, you first must submit a FOIA request directly to the FBI requesting responsive records remaining in their custody or the file designations for records transferred to the National Archives.

As it happened, NARA did not have possession of the documents in question, and the documents it did have required TS/CSI level clearance to access. Also, per the Presidential Records Act (PRA), Trump’s presidential records were “not available for access or public review” until January 20, 2026—five years after the end of Trump’s term. Plus, the “binder of materials” was with the DOJ and under FOIA review. Oh, and not only that, but the documents in that binder are not actually presidential records but federal records, and thus subject to the Federal Records Act and not the PRA.

Reading through the emails, it looks to me like Patel and Solomon thought the “binder of materials” was just sitting on a shelf at NARA, and why couldn’t these Deep State bureaucrats just copy the damn thing and send it along? Meanwhile, attempts by NARA to verify Patel’s alleged security clearance proved unsuccessful.

When Patel’s attempt to play bad cop to Solomon’s good cop did not achieve the desired results with Stern and NARA—“Where are we? These delays are unacceptable and easily solvable.”—Solomon filed a lawsuit. That’s how I’m able to read the correspondence between Stern, Solomon, and an increasingly hostile Kash Patel.

(In those emails, Stern implores Solomon to explain to Trump how NARA works, in light of Donald’s public grousing about Obama’s Presidential records being relocated to Chicago. “Could you please explain to Trump that it was NARA, not Obama, who moved the unclassified records to Chicago (and that we kept the classified records in the DC area), where we continue to maintain and provide access to them.”)

Filed on March 21, 2023, the Solomon lawsuit is a complaint for replevin and mandamus—which are legal terms and not characters from Lord of the Rings—that accuses the DOJ and NARA of “apparently colluding to avoid the Presidential Records Act” and demands “recovery of the records.”

Last week, the Court ruled against Solomon, citing “numerous problems with the plaintiff’s case,” including the fact—which Gary Stern kept patiently trying to explain to Trump’s pigheaded designates—that “the records at issue are not presidential records under PRA because they are federal records under the Freedom of Information Act (‘FOIA.’).”

US District Judge Richard J. Leon then delivers the judicial equivalent of a spanking: “Plaintiff may quibble that accessing documents through the FOIA is not the same as the binder returned to DOJ now being handed over to NARA, but the latter is not recourse available under the law because the documents in that binder are not presidential records.”

And so Patel and Solomon must wait for the FOIA review to access the “binder of materials.” With any luck, this will happen well after November 5, when the documents can’t be weaponized to help re-elect Trump.

The original binder, meanwhile, remains lost.

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Photo credit: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Thanks to DH for the help on this.