Three days after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, the bureau opened a covert counterintelligence investigation to determine whether the sitting president of the United States was working on behalf of Russia. The probe, code-named "Oxferd Comma," ran for nearly two years before closing without charges, and the declassified records behind it raise hard questions about whether the FBI had any legitimate basis to treat the commander-in-chief as a foreign intelligence threat.
Newly released documents obtained by Fox News reveal the internal mechanics of the investigation, which grew out of the broader Crossfire Hurricane inquiry into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The FBI formally opened Oxferd Comma on May 16, 2017, with sign-off from FBI General Counsel James A. Baker and counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap.
The stated purpose: to find out whether Donald Trump was "wittingly or unwittingly" acting as an agent of the Russian Federation. A declassified FBI memo justified the probe in stark bureaucratic language:
"Based on the facts and circumstances provided to date, the FBI believes that opening this investigation is the least intrusive method to address the serious national security risk posed by the activities alleged."
The investigation sought to determine whether Trump was "directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation" in a way that threatened national security. No public evidence in the declassified materials supports the conclusion that any such coordination existed.
Trump dismissed Comey on May 9, 2017. The official justification centered on Comey's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authored a memo making that case, and both Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions recommended the firing. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, Trump framed the move as essential to restoring public confidence in the bureau.
Trump said at the time: "It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission."
But behind the scenes, the decision was messier. The Washington Times detailed how the Mueller report later reconstructed the timeline. Trump had dictated a draft termination letter to aide Stephen Miller at his Bedminster golf club, citing frustration over Russia investigation coverage. He asked Rosenstein to include "Russia stuff" in the recommendation memo. Rosenstein refused, confining his analysis to the Clinton email matter.
Both Sessions and Rosenstein warned White House counsel Don McGahn that the administration was building a false narrative by suggesting Rosenstein had independently initiated the firing decision. Trump himself muddied the waters two days after the dismissal, telling NBC's Lester Holt on May 11, 2017:
"In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story."
That comment handed the FBI a pretext. Within five days, Oxferd Comma was open.
The declassified materials suggest that even senior FBI officials harbored reservations about the probe's foundation. On May 19, 2017, just three days after Oxferd Comma launched, then-Deputy Assistant Director Pete Strzok sent a text message that would later become one of the investigation's most damning internal admissions:
"I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there."
Strzok's candid doubt, expressed privately while the investigation he helped supervise was barely days old, cuts against the FBI's formal claim that the probe addressed a "serious national security risk." If one of the bureau's own senior counterintelligence figures suspected the case lacked substance from the outset, the question becomes why the investigation persisted for nearly two years.
The FBI's decision to treat a presidential personnel action as evidence of possible foreign control represented an extraordinary step. The declassified memos behind the probe show the bureau framing a lawful exercise of executive authority as a potential counterintelligence threat.
Oxferd Comma closed on April 9, 2019. No charges were filed against Trump. As the New York Post reported, the probe ended without producing evidence that Trump had acted as a Russian agent in any capacity.
The post-mortem was even more damaging to the FBI's credibility. Former Special Counsel John Durham, after years of investigation into the origins of the Russia probe, concluded that the broader FBI Russia investigation was "seriously flawed" and had no basis in evidence. Durham's findings applied to the entire Crossfire Hurricane apparatus, the same investigative framework from which Oxferd Comma grew.
The naming conventions the FBI chose for its Trump-Russia probes have themselves drawn scrutiny from critics who argue the bureau's internal culture reflected bias rather than dispassionate analysis. Oxferd Comma, whatever its etymological origins, joined Crossfire Hurricane on the list of code names now synonymous with one of the most contested chapters in modern federal law enforcement.
James Comey's firing did not end his entanglement with federal investigators. Andrew C. McCarthy wrote in National Review that Comey appeared to be the target of a leak investigation spanning both the Trump and Biden administrations. McCarthy argued that the more significant issue was not the leak itself but "the former FBI director's use of Russian disinformation and the role that might have played in Trump's 2016 win."
That framing inverts the narrative the FBI constructed in 2017. The bureau opened Oxferd Comma on the theory that Trump posed a Russian intelligence risk. Durham and subsequent reviews found that the FBI itself had relied on unverified and politically sourced material to justify its surveillance and investigative activities.
Comey has continued to make public statements about Trump. As CLN has previously covered, the former director called Trump "nuts" even as federal charges loomed over Comey himself. His willingness to engage in public broadsides while facing his own legal exposure has struck many observers as inconsistent with the restrained posture expected of former law enforcement leaders.
The Oxferd Comma probe did not exist in isolation. Investigative journalist Sara Carter has described the moment she realized the FBI was surveilling Trump's transition team, placing the counterintelligence apparatus's interest in Trump well before the Comey firing gave the bureau its stated justification for the new probe.
The timeline matters. If the FBI's concerns about Trump and Russia predated the firing, then the Comey dismissal was a convenient trigger rather than a genuine inflection point. If the concerns arose only after the firing, then the bureau effectively treated a president's exercise of his constitutional removal power as probable cause for a counterintelligence case. Neither reading reflects well on the institution.
Trump himself told Sessions, in words recorded by Sessions' chief of staff: "You left me on an island. I can't do anything." That remark, directed at Sessions over the attorney general's recusal from the Russia investigation, captures the isolation Trump described feeling as the FBI and Justice Department pursued an investigation he insisted was baseless.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed whether any additional investigative steps taken under Oxferd Comma involved surveillance of Trump's communications, financial records, or associates beyond what has already been disclosed through the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations. Investigators have not said whether Baker or Priestap faced internal review for approving a probe that Durham later characterized as part of a "seriously flawed" investigative effort.
No public results have been released about whether the FBI conducted any formal damage assessment tied to Oxferd Comma, or whether the probe's closure in April 2019 prompted any internal corrective action before Durham's appointment.
The legal battles over preserving investigation records from this era remain active, with former intelligence officials fighting to ensure documents are not destroyed. Those records may hold answers to questions the declassified memos raise but do not resolve.
The Oxferd Comma file sat classified for years. Its contents, now partially visible, confirm what Trump and his allies argued from the start: the FBI used a lawful presidential decision as the basis for treating the president as a suspected foreign agent. The probe found nothing. The broader investigation it grew from was later judged to have lacked evidentiary justification.
None of that undoes the damage. The investigation consumed years of a presidency, fueled a special counsel appointment, and cast a shadow over every policy decision Trump made involving Russia. The institutional machinery that produced Oxferd Comma operated without meaningful external check until well after the fact.
When the FBI's own senior counterintelligence official privately suspects "there's no big there there" on day three of an investigation, and the probe still runs for two years, the problem is not one bad decision. It is a system that lacks the will to correct itself before the damage is done.
