GOP senators demand release of Crossfire Hurricane documents they say will 'expose corruption' in FBI

Republican Senators have demanded that the FBI and Department of Justice hand over documents related to the Russia collusion investigation against President Donald Trump, known as Crossfire Hurricane, which they say will "expose corruption" within the FBI, a priority of Trump and his administration. 

Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley sent a letter on Monday to FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding that they hand over unreleased documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, per the Daily Mail.

Senators had requested an unedited transcript from the Inspector General’s report on the investigation in April 2023, but the version that was given to them had redactions. 

Johnson and Grassley wrote that the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has said that they do not have the authority to remove the redactions. They wrote, "In response to our request, the OIG said, 'many of the redactions in those transcripts were made by the Justice Department, the Department of State, or other United States government agencies. Thus, in addition to the OIG concerns described above, the OIG does not have the authority to release information that those agencies have indicated is exempt from disclosure.'"

Crossfire Hurricane was launched in 2016 by the FBI to investigate potential links between Trump’s campaign and Russia, which was found to have been based on false information. In response, then-Attorney General Bill Barr appointed special counsel John Durham to investigate misconduct in the investigation, which he concluded in his over 300-page report that the FBI did not have enough "factual evidence" to investigate, and that the DOJ and FBI "failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law."

Durham wrote in his report, which was released in 2023, "Based on the evidence gathered in the multiple exhaustive and costly federal investigations of these matters, including the instant investigation, 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."