The US lost and has not been able to find a secret dossier on Trump's ties to Russia for almost three years. The documents in this dossier were so secret that even congressmen and their aides, who have the highest level of access, could only view them at CIA headquarters in a special isolated room.
And despite all this, the folder with the materials that formed the basis of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election, containing information about Russian agents collected by the United States and NATO countries, disappeared in the last days of Donald Trump's presidency.
Source. CNN writes about this with reference to information received from a dozen and a half people familiar with the event.
Despite all efforts, the dossier has not been found. Last year, intelligence agencies involved in protecting national security informed the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee about the missing materials and efforts to find them.
The dossier, according to eyewitnesses, was a folder about 25 cm thick. It is a collection of raw information that, in particular, the FBI later used to investigate Russian interference in the election and assistance to Trump's presidential campaign.
In a report published in January 2017, the intelligence community claimed that Vladimir Putin ordered an "influence campaign" to undermine Hillary Clinton's chances of being elected and support Trump.
As president, Trump has repeatedly tried to declassify documents from the dossier in order to prove that the intelligence investigation is a "witch hunt." However, his own advisers have consistently opposed their full publication.
The day before his term ended, in early 2021, Trump issued an executive order declassifying most of the dossier. Within two days, the White House had prepared numerous redacted copies of the materials; they were to be distributed to Republicans in Congress and right-wing journalists.
But immediately after the distribution, White House lawyers ordered them to be sent back and redacted even more heavily to hide important intelligence information.
A few minutes before Joe Biden's inauguration, Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, delivered the latest redacted copy to the Justice Department. The Department has since released not all of the documents. Additional copies with varying degrees of redaction were sent to the National Archives.
In this chaos, the original folder with the raw data disappeared.
"The circumstances of its disappearance are shrouded in mystery," CNN writes. It was also not found among the classified documents that Trump illegally took to his Florida residence Mar-a-Lago and the FBI seized during a search last year.
Background. As a reminder, according to intelligence, Russia is developing a plan to attack NATO countries, which should come into force after the successful completion of the war in Ukraine. It is noted that the United States and Poland are aware of these plans.