Former White House Aide: Trump’s Declassified Documents Had to Do With ‘Russiagate’

A former top Trump administration official said he thinks the FBI may have taken documents relating to the Russia–Trump collusion investigation during the raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home earlier this month.

Former Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel said in a recent interview that documents that were stored at Mar-a-Lago and marked as classified were declassified when Trump left office in January 2021. He says federal officials will have a difficult time proving that those documents weren’t declassified.

“The bottom line was he said this information has to get out to the American public,” Patel told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Aug. 21. Patel said he didn’t know exactly what was in the boxes that FBI agents took from Trump’s home.

“It had to do with Russiagate. It had to do with the Hillary email scandal. It had to do with a whole lot of other stuff. And [Trump] said, ‘This is all declassified,’” Patel said, challenging a central claim made by the Justice Department (DOJ) that urgent action had to be taken because sensitive material was at risk.

So far, neither the DOJ nor the FBI has offered a public explanation about why the FBI agents searched a former president’s home or what they were looking for. DOJ and FBI officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

A warrant and property receipt that were unsealed more than a week ago by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart show that agents took 11 boxes of allegedly classified documents, although it isn’t clear what those documents are. The warrant indicates that Trump is being probed for possible Espionage Act violations and obstruction of justice.

Republicans, Trump, and some media outlets have called for the DOJ’s affidavit—a legal document that would explain why

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