FBI secretly investigated Trump as Russian asset over his 'views' on arming Ukraine

After more than nine years of secrecy, declassified files show that the FBI investigated Trump as an agent of Russia over a manufactured Ukraine controversy and a quote from his son.

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Four months into President Donald Trump’s first stint in office, the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation of him as a suspected asset of the Russian government. At the direction of then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, the FBI sought to determine if Trump “was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation,” and accordingly posed “threats to the national security of the United States.”

The predicate for this unprecedented probe of a sitting president as the agent of a foreign power has been kept from the public ever since. When I obtained the first public release of its opening document in late 2024, just weeks before Trump’s second term, the FBI redacted the entire “articulable factual basis.” After more than nine years of secrecy, a new declassification by the Trump White House confirms that the investigation, codenamed “Oxferd Comma” [sic] and launched on May 16, 2017, was not driven by any secret information tying Trump to Russia. It was instead based on the FBI leadership’s maximalist, neoconservative-influenced reactions to innocuous and falsely reported public events.

One of the FBI’s triggers was a controversy that erupted in July 2016 at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. At the time, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin claimed that the Trump campaign had removed an amendment from the party’s platform that called for arming Ukraine in its fight against Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas region. In reality, the RNC platform committee had merely rejected a proposal to endorse providing “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine. The Republicans’ final platform text instead called for “increasing sanctions” on Russia and “appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine,” which could easily have included weapons. The RNC platform was also far more hawkish than the Democrats’ platform that same summer, in line with the policies of President Obama, who had refused to send the same weaponry to Ukraine.

All of this was known at the time. Yet nearly one year later, the FBI decided that the issue flagged by Rogin’s exaggerated opinion column was grounds to suspect that Trump was working for Russia. According to the newly released, fully-declassified “Electronic Communication” that opened the probe, the FBI noted with alarm that “this platform change would be favorable to Russian interests” and that a Trump foreign policy advisor, JD Gordon, publicly admitted “that he pushed the platform change to align with Trump’s views.” Even assuming that a meaningless platform change would somehow help “Russian interests,” the FBI had decided that Trump’s purported “views” – whether the bureau had accurately described them or not – were sufficient grounds to investigate him as an agent of Moscow.

The document only underscores that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation was influenced by Cold War views and the conspiracy theories of an illicit Trump-Russia connection promoted by the Hillary Clinton campaign and its media allies.

Back in July 2016, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook declared that Trump had personally “changed the platform” to make it “more pro-Russian.” That same week, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, cited the RNC story as among the reasons to conclude that Trump had chosen to “unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” In his Clinton-funded fictional “dossier,” former UK intelligence officer Christopher Steele wrote that the Trump camp “had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue” in exchange for Russia’s election help. After Trump took office, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow declared that the dossier’s allegation of “essentially a quid pro quo between Russia and the Donald Trump campaign” over the platform change was the “latest” of Steele’s claims that “falls into place.”

In this neo-McCarthyite climate, it became an article of faith not only that Trump’s presidency was the product of a conspiracy with Moscow, but that the president himself was vulnerable to Russian financial leverage and outright blackmail. The FBI’s newly declassified document indicates that the bureau took its cues from this prevailing supposition as well. “Open source information indicates that President Trump has had longstanding business and real estate ties in Russia and former Soviet states, stemming from the late 1980s,” the document states. Yet the only concrete example of this is a widely circulated 2008 quote attributed to Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who “claimed that Russians made up a ‘disproportionate cross-section’ of many of President Trump’s assets.” Trump Jr. was celebrating the fact that wealthy Russians were buying up Trump-branded foreign luxury properties, unaware of the possibility that this would one day be seen as grounds to investigate his father for taking orders from Vladimir Putin.

The FBI’s decision to investigate Trump over the meaningless Ukraine weaponry-related platform change became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Upon taking office, neoconservatives in Trump’s cabinet and on Capitol Hill exploited the allegations that he was a Russian asset to convince him to authorize arming Ukraine in ways that Obama had refused, out of fears of fueling an escalation. When Trump briefly paused one such weapons shipment in 2019 while pressuring Ukraine to assist with his Russiagate-fueled political vendettas, House Democrats impeached him. Trump’s decision to arm Ukraine, along with the impeachment controversy, helped sabotage the Minsk peace accords, the internationally endorsed pact for ending the Donbas civil war. Ukraine’s refusal to implement Minsk, with U.S. encouragement, ultimately helped trigger Russia’s February 2022 invasion. (The full story is told in my forthcoming book, “Their Blood, Our Bullets.”)

The FBI’s counterintelligence probe of Trump followed an earlier investigation of his campaign members, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” which was opened the previous July. Previous declassifications show that this probe was just as baseless. The FBI acted on hearsay that a Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had made a “suggested ... suggestion” of possible, unspecified Russian help to the campaign. Yet the FBI deemed this vague piece of gossip sufficient to launch arguably the most consequential national security investigation in U.S. history.

Both investigations were folded into the inquiry led by Robert Mueller, who was appointed just one day after the FBI began portraying Trump internally as a possible Russian agent or conspirator. Mueller’s final report “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

The new declassification comes one year after the public also belatedly learned that Mueller and U.S. intelligence leaders concealed doubts at the highest level about Russiagate’s core allegation: that Moscow interfered in the election to help Trump defeat Clinton. A previously unpublished Intelligence Community Assessment, circulated within the government on September 12, 2016, stated that the FBI and the National Security Agency had “low confidence” that Russia was behind the hack and release of Democratic Party emails. Emails also showed that the head of the NSA, Mike Rogers, complained that his analysts were denied access to the underlying intelligence used to make the attribution to Russia. Rather than address Rogers’ concerns, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, denied his request and told him to acquiesce. “It is essential that we (CIA/NSA/FBI/ODNI) be on the same page ... in the highest tradition of ‘that’s OUR story, and we’re stickin’ to it,’” Clapper wrote. “... This is one project that has to be a team sport.”

After yet another nine-year delay, the public has learned more details of how top intelligence officials stuck to their deception in a sprawling, and still unraveling, effort to tie Trump to Russia.