White House declassifies info on secret FBI probe into Trump's firing of Comey
The White House has declassified information claiming the FBI probed whether President Trump acted as a Russian asset when he fired James Comey, a theory an administration official said wasn't backed up by evidence.
Updated on: August 5, 2026 / 6:17 AM EDT / CBS News
The official said the investigation, known as Oxford Comma, was a subcomponent of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI probe into potential collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government — an investigation that has long drawn Mr. Trump's ire. The predicate of Oxford Comma was the newly elected president's decision to fire Comey in 2017.
The case was marked sensitive, which is generally done to keep a case off the books from other agents, the official said. The agents who opened the case said they believe it was going to be the least intrusive method to address a serious national security risk.
Oxford Comma was eventually rolled into Special Counsel Robert Mueller's larger probe into Mr. Trump, the official said, and was later found not to have any merit when the rest of the Mueller investigation was closed down.
"I was unaware that the predicate for the obstruction included a claim that Donald Trump was somehow acting on behalf of Vladimir Putin," the official said. "The short of it is, almost everything in the FBI's possession at that point had debunked or ruled out that Trump or his campaign was colluding with Russia at that time."