(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that 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 Judicial Watch’s 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, Judicial Watch 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.
Judicial Watch’s 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.”
Judicial Watch 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 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,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “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, Judicial Watch 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, Judicial Watch 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, Judicial Watch 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). Judicial Watch 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, Judicial Watch announced that in response to a its FOIA lawsuit, the Justice Department admitted in a court filing that 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, Judicial Watch 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, Judicial Watch released documents about FISA warrants targeting Carter Page, who had been a Trump campaign adviser.
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