It's a story that leaps off the pages of a high-stakes thriller. A binder laden with top secret intelligence files on Russia vanishes without a trace from the White House. The binder contained raw data pertaining to Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. election, including intensely sensitive intelligence methods and sources. This is the same key information that served as the foundation for the U.S. government's assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin endeavored to assist Trump in winning the 2016 election.
The binder's disappearance resulted in such high alarm among intelligence officials that Senate Intelligence Committee leadership was briefed on the matter last year. It's worth noting that upon investigation, this missing binder was not among the classified items found in last year's search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.
This binder has been MIA for more than two years, its whereabouts still a mystery. The intelligence it contains was part of a plethora of documents that President Trump ordered to be brought to the White House, seeing it as proof of his allegations that the Russia investigation was a hoax. This resulted in a whirlwind of action in the administration's final days to redact these documents for public declassification.
The former President did issue a declassification order for these materials on his last day in office but his departure from the White House preempted their public release. A supporter of Trump seeks to influence the federal government to take action, having filed a lawsuit to further this cause.
This mystery deepens as one theory suggests that the binder ended up in the possession of Mark Meadows, former Chief of Staff, as revealed by Cassidy Hutchinson, his top aide. Despite this claim, Meadows' attorney staunchly refutes this idea.
Officials from the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Justice Department, and the Trump campaign have all declined to comment on this perplexing mystery of the vanishing binder, leaving us with more questions than answers in this enigma.
