FBI Says It Will Take 158 Years to Process “Hidden Room” Records
Virginia Removes 6,531 Declared Noncitizen Registrations from Voter Rolls
Judicial Watch Sues FBI for 30 Million Transferred January 6 Phone Records
Judicial Watch Sues for Robert Mueller Records
SPLC’s Radical Curriculum Used to Train Educators Across U.S.
FBI Says It Will Take 158 Years to Process “Hidden Room” Records
This is simply amazing. The FBI has told a federal court that, at a rate of 500 pages a month, processing records from the “hidden room” at FBI Headquarters would take approximately 158 years.
The room — now dubbed the “burn bag room” — holds over 2 million pages of records, according to the FBI’s own filing. Then-Deputy Director Bongino said in May 2025 that some of the records were found stashed “in bags.”
The figures came in a Joint Status Report filed July 30, 2026, in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:25-cv-04047)).
In the filing, we asked the court to allow it to question the FBI, through a limited deposition, about its handling of the records — including who discovered the room and when, who had access to it, its security classification, how records ended up stored in file cabinets, safes, boxes, and burn bags, what the FBI has done to bring them under standard records management, and whether the records were ever searched in response to other FOIA requests.
The FBI reports that it has yet to access a safe believed to contain records. The agency also alleges that “it will take approximately 158 years to process at a rate of 500 pages a month.”
The FBI opposes the request for discovery. A status conference is scheduled before U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich on August 3, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Our 2025 complaint sought all records in the room, which it described as “[a]ll documents referenced by Deputy Director Dan Bongino” concerning a room at FBI Headquarters, as well as internal FBI communications among officials in the offices of Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Bongino about the discovery of the documents, and any directives issued on how the records should be handled. The FBI currently says it has no records responsive to the Patel/Bongino communications and directives categories. The plaintiff is challenging the government’s search for these records as well.
In a Fox News interview on May 29, 2025, then-FBI Deputy Director Bongino disclosed the room’s existence, stating:
“There was a room [in FBI Headquarters], and we found stuff. A lot of stuff … hidden from us at least and not mentioned to us. And then found stuff in there. A lot is from the Comey era. We are working … right now to declassify. And just so you know, because I get the public—I totally understand people saying ‘well do it now.’ The process is: not all of the information is ours to declassify. Some is other intelligence agencies’…. We literally can’t do it. Once that gets done … and you read some of the stuff we found—that, by the way, was not processed through the normal procedure, digitizing and putting in FBI records. We found it in bags, hiding under Jim Comey’s FBI. You’re going to be stunned.”
We previously uncovered that the room is a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) containing several safes—now identified as twenty file cabinets—holding between roughly 950,000 and 1,900,000 pages of records, split into two categories: “legacy files,” older records mostly tied to two closed historical investigations and more recent files tied to active investigations and prior Special Counsel records, reportedly including material connected to Special Counsel Jack Smith.
American citizens should be outraged that the FBI just told a federal court judge that its stonewalling means it will take 158 years to release the 2 million weaponization and lawfare records in its secret ‘burn bag’ room. The American people need to know today how the FBI was used as a political weapon against Donald Trump and other innocents.
This is the latest in a series of Judicial Watch investigations targeting shady FBI weaponization and abuse of power.
In August 2019, we uncovered “302” report material from FBI interviews with Bruce Ohr, who was removed from his position as U.S. Associate Deputy Attorney General in December 2017.
In March 2019, we received heavily redacted records from the Justice Department that reveal that Ohr remained in regular contact with former British spy and Fusion GPS contractor Christopher Steele after Steele was terminated by the FBI in November 2016 for revealing to the media his position as an FBI confidential informant.
In December 2018, we uncovered U.S. State Department documents showing classified information was researched and disseminated to multiple U.S. Senators by the Obama administration immediately prior to Trump’s inauguration. The documents reveal that among those receiving the classified documents were Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Sen. Robert Corker (R-TN). We obtained the documents through a FOIA lawsuit for records of the Obama State Department’s last-minute efforts to share classified information about Russia election interference issues with Cardin.
In August 2018, we announced that in response to a our FOIA lawsuit, the Justice Department admitted in a court filingthat the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held no hearings on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) spy warrant applications targeting Carter Page, a former Trump campaign part-time advisor who was the subject of four controversial FISA warrants.
Also in August, we forced the release of heavily redacted records about Christopher Steele, the former British spy, hired with Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funds, who authored the infamous dossier targeting Trump during last year’s presidential campaign. The documents show that Steele was cut off as a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS) after he disclosed his relationship with the FBI to a third party. The documents also show at least 11 FBI payments to Steele in 2016 and document that he was admonished for unknown reasons in February 2016.
In July 2018, we released documents about FISA warrants targeting Carter Page, who had been a Trump campaign adviser.
Virginia Removes 6,531 Declared Noncitizen Registrations from Voter Rolls
Records from the Virginia Department of Elections show the commonwealth cancelled 6,531 “declared noncitizen” voter registrations between June 2024 and June 2026 after we launched an inquiry.
The Virginia Department of Elections produced records in response to the below June 2026 Judicial Watch request:
Pursuant to Section 8(i) of the National Voter Registration Act (“NVRA”), Judicial Watch, Inc. respectfully requests from your office all pertinent records in the past two years concerning “the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency” of the Virginia official list of eligible voters. Specifically, Judicial Watch requests the following:
- All records concerning the names and addresses of registrants removed from the official list of eligible voters pursuant to Va. Code Ann. § 24.2-427(B)(iii) and Va. Code Ann. § 24.2-427.
- All records concerning all voter registrations that may not to be United States citizens by reason of reports from the Department of Motor Vehicles or from the Department of Elections based on information received from the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program (SAVE Program).
- All ERIC reports, data, match lists, or other records received from or related to the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) system concerning potential voter deaths, change-of-address notifications, or other eligibility issues (including any associated processing, verification, or removal actions taken by the Department of Elections in response to such ERIC reports).
No voting histories were produced for the cancelled declared noncitizen registrations.
According to an April 2026, Virginia Attorney General letter:
DMV [Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles] creates a list of “all persons who have indicated a noncitizen status” when applying for or renewing a license, or identification document. In practice, DMV compiles a list of any individual who checks “no” in response to the question “Are you a citizen?” in an online portal. There are reports that this method has resulted in flagging eligible citizens due to inadvertent user error. DMV furnishes this list of self-attested noncitizens to ELECT daily. ELECT then electronically matches the DMV list against the voter registration list, and transmits, for each match, information from the DMV list to the appropriate registrar. After independently confirming that the individual flagged by DMV matches a voter registration record, registrars must send a notice of intent to cancel, allowing the person 14 days to submit a sworn statement confirming citizenship. If the person does not respond and confirm their citizenship, the registrar must cancel their registration. For clarity, in this opinion, this second program is called “Self-Attestation Removals.”
Also in April 2026, Virginia entered into a settlement with leftist groups in which Virginia agreed to pause the program to remove declared noncitizens from voting rolls for the 90-day period before federal elections. (The Attorney General letter cited above confirms this new policy.)
A federal law –18 U.S.C. § 1015(f) — makes it a crime to knowingly make a false claim of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote or vote in any federal, state, or local election. 18 U.S.C. § 611 — is the direct prohibition on aliens voting in any election for federal office
It is disturbing beyond belief that as many as 6,531 noncitizens were registered to vote in Virginia. We are demanding more details and so should federal law enforcement, especially as Virginia is set to stop removing declared noncitizens from the rolls in the run-up to the November election. These Virginia numbers show that the New Jersey noncitizen voter scandal is just the tip of the iceberg and is a national crisis.
We are a national leader in election integrity and voting rights litigation, with a record of successful lawsuits enforcing constitutional redistricting standards and cleaning voter rolls nationwide.
Our lawsuits and legal actions have caused the removal of six million ineligible names from voter lists nationwide, including from Oregon, Colorado, Kentucky and New York City. Judicial Watch legal pressure also resulted in voter roll clean-ups in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Ohio.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice has announced its intention to file a motion to intervene in our federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a California political candidate and a state political party against the State of California due to its failure to maintain accurate voter rolls as required by the NVRA.
A federal court in Illinois ruled that our lawsuit to force the cleaning of voter rolls may proceed in that state.
In January 2026, in a historic case we filed, the Supreme Court decided 7-2 in favor of Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors who were before the court to vindicate their standing to challenge an Illinois law allowing the counting of ballots received up to 14 days after Election Day.
Judicial Watch Sues FBI for 30 Million Transferred January 6 Phone Records
The infamous House January 6 Select Committee didn’t target just President Donald Trump. Republican senators were also dragged into scandal.
We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for records concerning the committee’s transfer of approximately 30 million lines of telephone toll data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (Judicial Watch, Inc., v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:26-cv-02557)).
We sued after the FBI failed to comply with an October 2025 FOIA request for:
- Communications of former Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Denver Riggleman (R-VA) with FBI officials regarding the reported acquisition or offer to provide the telephone toll data.
- All FBI records and internal communications regarding the reported acquisition or offer to provide the telephone toll data collected by the House January 6 Committee.
In February 2022, the FBI opened “Arctic Frost,” an investigation into alleged efforts by Trump campaign associates to obstruct Congress’s certification of the 2020 election. The probe aggressively targeted dozens of GOP officials and organizations before closing in January 2025.
A December 2023 FBI FD-302 interview summary reveals that Kinzinger proactively offered the January 6 Committee’s massive database to the FBI. The summary states:
Kinzinger stated the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol (the “Select Committee”) collected and linked a substantial amount of telephone data, and noted the FBI may already possess such data. While former Congressman Denver Riggleman worked with the Select Committee, he (Riggleman) had a contact and was able to obtain toll information, including for White House “root” or switchboard numbers via congressional subpoena. Kinzinger noted that he (Kinzinger) did not conduct the analysis himself, but that Riggleman had identified certain telephonic connections between numbers identified as being associated with the White House and certain individuals….
Kinzinger indicated that Riggleman may have never received direction on what to do with the toll data, which included approximately 30 million lines of data. Kinzinger believed it was in an electronic format, but did not know if it was the original [redacted] returns.
In October 2025, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary reported that “the FBI targeted eight Republican senators’ personal cell phones for ‘tolling data’ as part of its Arctic Frost investigation. One Republican member of the House of Representatives was also impacted. The Arctic Frost investigation formed the basis of [Special Counsel] Jack Smith’s elector case against President Donald Trump.”
The FBI must stop concealing the truth. Thirty million lines of Americans’ phone records weaponized by a partisan committee and federal investigators against President Trump and his supporters represents one of the most brazen abuses of power in modern history. The American people deserve every record — no more stonewalling.
We have conducted a massive, independent investigation into the events of January 6.
On July 6, 2026, the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department released to us over 1,000 hours of body-worn camera footage in 1,627 videos from the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol event. The videos were released because of an April 2026 court ruling in a DC FOIA lawsuit. The videos are available via the Judicial Watch website here.
In August 2025, we announced that the U.S. Air Force would finally provide full military funeral honors to Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was shot and killed inside the U.S. Capitol by then-Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd on January 6, 2021. Babbitt was the only official January 6 homicide victim. The Biden administration had previously denied Babbitt and her family these honors in retaliation for being at the U.S. Capitol that day. This decision came on the heels of a massive, nearly $5 million Trump administration settlement to her family for wrongful death and other claims against the U.S. Government.
In July 2025, we sued the Justice Department for records on accelerated January 6 prosecutions after Trump was elected president in November 2024. The Biden administration, anticipating President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to issue pardons for January 6, 2021, defendants, is believed to have accelerated prosecutions in the final months of Biden’s term.
In March 2024, we received Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) records from the Justice Department in a FOIA lawsuit that showed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deployed personnel to Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021.
In October 2023, we received the declaration of James W. Joyce, senior counsel in the Office of the General Counsel for the Capitol Police, in which he describes emails among senior officials of the United States Capitol Police (USCP) in January 2021 that show warnings of possible January 6 protests that could lead to serious disruptions at the U.S. Capitol.
Judicial Watch Sues for Robert Mueller Records
The American people deserve a full accounting of Robert Mueller’s record—from the FBI’s dramatic expansion of surveillance powers after September 11 to the abusive special counsel investigation targeting President Trump. The Justice Department should immediately release every record concerning Mueller so Americans can judge his work for themselves.
Accordingly, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for records regarding the late FBI Director and Special Counsel Robert Mueller (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:26-cv-02566)).
We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) failed to respond to a March 24, 2026, FOIA request seeking:
All records in any form related to the former FBI Director, Robert Swan Mueller, III, born on August 7, 1944, in New York City, NY, who died on March 20, 2026.
Mueller served as FBI director from September 2001 to September 2013. During his tenure, the FBI significantly expanded its domestic surveillance authorities. Among other powers, the bureau made extensive use of expanded authorities under the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, including National Security Letters, which allowed the FBI to compel the production of financial, telecommunications and internet records without prior judicial approval while often prohibiting recipients from disclosing the requests.
Three years after Mueller left the FBI, the bureau launched “Crossfire Hurricane,” also known as “Russiagate,” into allegations of links between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. Then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel in May 2017 to continue the investigation. Mueller served in that role until March 2019.
Mueller’s investigation concluded that it “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
In May 2023, Special Counsel John Durham concluded that the FBI failed to uphold its mission of “strict fidelity to the law” when pursuing Crossfire Hurricane and found that the bureau lacked sufficiently corroborated information to justify opening a full investigation.
In March 2025, President Trump issued a memorandum, calling for the immediate declassification of materials “related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.”
We have pursued dozens of FOIA lawsuits in connection with the illicit targeting and other abuses of President Trump and his associates.
In October 2020, we uncovered emails between former FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok, who joined the Mueller team in 2017, and former FBI attorney Lisa Page showing that Microsoft Outlook’s Exchange server had to recreate multiple meetings that were “missing” from Page’s initial calendar entries. These missing meetings included the subjects “Going Dark Strategy Meeting,” “Twitter” and “702 Reauthorization Strategy Coordination Bi-Weekly” (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)).
In September 2020, we received Justice Department records showing that senior members of Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office repeatedly and “accidentally” wiped phones assigned to them (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice(No. 1:19-cv-02693)).
Also in September 2020, we uncovered Justice Department records that included a May 2017 email documenting that Mueller informed the attorney general’s office he was withdrawing from consideration for FBI director. The email raised questions about Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in July 2019, when he said a May 2017 interview with Trump was “not about me applying for the job” as FBI director (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-00481)).
In July 2020, we uncovered emails showing that Strzok, Page and other top FBI officials in the days before and after Trump’s 2017 inauguration discussed a White House counterintelligence briefing that could “play into” the FBI’s “investigative strategy” (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)).
In May 2020, we received the electronic communication (EC) that officially launched Crossfire Hurricane. The document was written by Strzok (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-02743)).
In February 2020, we made public Strzok-Page emails showing direct involvement in the opening of Crossfire Hurricane. The records also showed additional “confirmed classified emails” were found on Clinton’s unsecured non-state.gov email server “beyond the number presented” in then-FBI Director James Comey’s statements; Strzok and Page questioned the access the Justice Department was granting Clinton’s lawyers; and Page revealed that the Justice Department was making edits to FBI FD-302 reports related to the Clinton Midyear Exam investigation. The emails also detail a discussion about “squashing” an issue related to the Seth Rich controversy (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)).
In February 2020, we uncovered Rosenstein’s communications with former Obama officials, such as Eric Holder, as well as information sharing with the media in the days immediately surrounding the inception of the Mueller investigation (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-00481)).
In October 2019, we released Rosenstein’s communications that included a one-line email to Mueller stating, “The boss and his staff do not know about our discussions,” and “off the record” emails with major media outlets around the date of Mueller’s appointment. In May 2017, Rosenstein had written a memo to President Trump recommending that FBI Director James Comey be fired. That day, Trump fired Comey. Three days later, on May 12, Rosenstein sent the email assuring Mueller that Trump and his staff were not included in their “discussions” (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-00481)).
In May 2019, we released Justice Department records containing text messages and calendar entries of Mueller special counsel prosecutor Andrew Weissmann showing he led the hiring effort for the special counsel team. Weissmann was formerly the Obama-era chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Fraud Section (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-01356)).
In July 2018, we received FBI records concerning the assignment of Strzok to Mueller’s operation, showing that Strzok insisted on retaining his FBI security clearance, declassification and other authorities before moving to the Mueller team (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Federal Bureau of Investigation (No. 1:17-cv-02682)). Strzok was removed from the Mueller investigative team in July 2017, with the move becoming public in August. He was reassigned to a human resources position.
SPLC’s Radical Curriculum Used to Train Educators Across U.S.
Do you know what they’re teaching your children? Do you know what they’re teaching your children’s future teachers? Our Corruption Chronicles blog has a disturbing report.
The leftwing ideology deeply embedded in the American public education system is being fortified with the incorporation of a radical “Learning for Justice” curriculum—often funded with taxpayer dollars—in colleges across the country that are training future teachers, assuring that the indoctrination continues for generations to come. A new report published by an education nonprofit reveals that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a controversial leftist group that slanders conservative organizations in an interactive “Hate Map”, created the program lessons, resources and Social Justice Standards (SJS) in the educator training classes at Colleges of Education (COE) across the country. In some cases, federal grants pay for the biased teacher training that blends social justice standards into virtually all lessons.
The outrageous Learning for Justice curriculum is used to train future educators in 38 states plus the District of Columbia and at least 100 COEs nationwide utilize it, according to the probe conducted by the nonprofit Defending Education. The Virginia-based group confirms that the COEs that have adopted the SPLC’s material are responsible for preparing K-12 classroom teachers as well as the continuing education of present teachers and administrators, which means they play a major role in what content, materials, best practices and perspectives shape the educators. “This report also examines academic journal articles, doctoral dissertations, and master’s theses to provide additional insight into how SPLC materials and Social Justice Standards are incorporated into Colleges of Education, teacher preparation programs, and K-12 classrooms,” reads the report published by the charity that aims for the reestablishment of a quality, non-political education for all students. “Importantly, few COEs outwardly acknowledge their use of SPLC materials; instead, many COEs hide their usage and promotion behind faculty login pages.”
Among the cases outlined in the report is a $275,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for a venture between Northern Arizona University and the Flagstaff Unified School District that incorporates Learning for Justice’s SJS into its computer science curriculum. In another example, the Department of Education gave a California graduate program $3.3 million to “develop and cultivate educators-in-training” with “social justice teaching ideas and practices,” including “Social Justice Standards from Teaching Tolerance.” The University of Maryland College of Education’s master’s for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teachers features a key theme of “Equity, Access, and Anti-bias Education” that integrates social justice standards and critical practices from the SPLC’s Learning for Justice into its programs. The entire Maryland State Department of Education also incorporates Social Justice Standards into its regulations governing new teacher induction programming run by school districts. The University of Michigan’s education program is centered on a “more just and equitable elementary science teaching” that draws from Learning for Justice and Kutztown University in Pennsylvania forces future educators to complete a special “teaching tolerance module” to fulfill a requirement of developing an understanding of diversity.
The list of examples goes on and on, with colleges in California, Oregon, Washington State, Massachusetts and Virginia using the discriminatory SPLC material. Even top public universities in Republican states have adopted it and mandate it in educator training courses. The University of Florida’s College of Education has a required course called “Equity Pedagogy Foundations” that aims to define educational equity by exploring the foundational concepts of race, class, ability and sexuality as they impact children in schools. Florida Atlantic University trains future teachers with courses such as “Introduction to Diversity for Educators, Equity Issues in Multicultural Education and Education in Multicultural Society.” The University of North Texas makes future educators take an advanced teaching course that features required readings from Learning for Justice’s Social Justice Standards. The University of Kansas incorporates the SPLC’s “importance of multicultural education” in all teacher programs and Western Kentucky University mandates a diversity in the classroom course that requires students to read a book called “There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom.”
This latest report on the SPLC’s enormous influence in training the nation’s educators comes on the heels of an equally disturbing investigation that revealed the leftwing group has received millions of taxpayer dollars to spread its hateful message and materials across the United States, including in public schools. The money came from states, cities, counties, universities, school districts, and other public entities to help fulfill the SPLC’s stated mission of “dismantling white supremacy” and “creating a world where Black and Brown communities are represented and respected by our democracy.”
Until next week,
