On Monday, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan filed an extraordinary batch of documents in the public docket of her case against former FBI Director James Comey. The exhibits range from Comey’s communications with his handpicked FBI leaker, Daniel Richman, a Columbia law professor the bureau employed specifically to funnel Comey’s preferred narratives to the press, to text messages between Richman and New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt. But the most significant document by far is Comey’s own handwritten notes proving, beyond any doubt, that he knew early on the entire Russia collusion story was a Clinton campaign fabrication.
In other words, Comey knew he should have been investigating Hillary Clinton for orchestrating the most dangerous political hoax in American history, falsely accusing the Republican nominee of colluding with Russia. Instead, he chose to weaponize that lie, using the full force of the FBI to try to destroy Donald Trump. While the majority of the 14 new exhibits reveal how Comey lied and manipulated media narratives through his anonymous conduit — for example, to polish his own image or to make Trump look bad — the most striking takeaway is that we now have proof Comey knew the Russia collusion story was orchestrated by the Clinton campaign.
It is remarkable that these documents survived at all. They were found in an FBI “burn bag,” a method for destroying sensitive materials. For reasons still unknown, several of these bags, reportedly five in total, were never incinerated. Instead, they were placed inside an unused, locked Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at FBI headquarters. Why they ended up there remains a mystery. Perhaps a silent whistleblower or conscientious staffer intervened.
According to a July 2025 internal FBI document opening an investigation into potential crimes surrounding the burn bags, it appears they were placed in the unused SCIF in the days leading up to Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. This suggests that the documents — which also included materials related to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, and the highly classified annex to Special Counsel John Durham’s report detailing how U.S. intelligence uncovered in the summer of 2016 that the Russia collusion plot was a Clinton fabrication — were either being collected for destruction and then forgotten, or time ran out or some other factor derailed that plan, or they were stored secretly to be discovered by the incoming Trump team.
Be that as it may, whether through luck, providence, or a quiet act of integrity, the burn bags remained in the SCIF, where they were discovered earlier this year by FBI director Kash Patel and his team. Their contents now form the backbone of the case against Comey.
Hellbound and Down 