The FBI launched a covert investigation into then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions the day after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, and the bureau's own records show the probe relied on a letter from two Democratic senators and a HuffPost article as its foundation. The investigation, codenamed MARCH TOLL, ran for a full year before closing without charges.
Newly declassified documents released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force reveal the scope and origin of the Sessions probe, raising fresh questions about the FBI's judgment during the frenzy that followed Comey's May 2017 dismissal. The records paint a picture of a bureau willing to open a criminal investigation into the sitting attorney general of the United States on the thinnest of predicates.
FBI headquarters directed the opening of MARCH TOLL on May 10, 2017, one day after Trump fired Comey, to investigate whether Sessions made false statements to Congress about his contacts with Russian officials. The timing alone is striking. But the predication is where the story turns from questionable to absurd.
The investigation rested on a March 20, 2017 letter from Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Al Franken addressed to Comey. In that letter, the senators accused Sessions of lacking candor during his confirmation hearings.
"We are concerned by Attorney General Sessions' lack of candor to the Committee and his failure thus far to accept responsibility for testimony that could be construed as perjury."
That letter, combined with a liberal news article, formed the basis for the FBI to target the nation's top law enforcement officer with a criminal investigation. No independent corroboration. No whistleblower. A letter from political opponents and a media report.
The declassified documents expose another problem with the FBI's rationale. By the time the bureau opened MARCH TOLL, Sessions had already supplemented his testimony. Just The News reported that Sessions updated his statements to the Senate on March 6, 2017, two weeks before Leahy and Franken even sent their letter to Comey.
In that supplemental testimony, Sessions explained his original answer in straightforward terms.
"I did not mention communications I had had with the Russian Ambassador over the years because the question did not ask about them."
The FBI opened its probe anyway. The bureau moved forward on May 10 despite having access to Sessions's correction, despite the absence of any evidence that Sessions had lied intentionally, and despite the fact that the predication consisted of a partisan letter and a press clipping.
The declassified FBI memos covering the same period show the bureau also launched a secret counterintelligence probe casting Trump himself as a potential Russian asset in the days following Comey's firing. MARCH TOLL fits squarely into that pattern: the FBI treated the Comey dismissal as a trigger for an investigative blitz aimed at the president and his closest allies.
MARCH TOLL dragged on for twelve months. The FBI eventually handed the matter to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office, which conducted its own review of Sessions's testimony and the underlying contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Mueller's team reached the same conclusion any fair reading of the facts would suggest: there was no case. The special counsel's office determined it could not prove Sessions had been "willfully untruthful." Without evidence of intent, a false-statements charge under 18 U.S.C. 1001 was a nonstarter.
The FBI's own closing memo documented the outcome in bureaucratic language that barely conceals the waste of time and resources.
"The Special Counsel's Office concurs with the request to close the investigation and provided written notification reflecting as such on May 8, 2018."
No charges. No referral. No public accountability for the agents and officials who greenlit the probe in the first place.
The Sessions investigation did not happen in isolation. The days surrounding Comey's termination saw a cascade of FBI actions that, viewed together, look less like independent law enforcement decisions and more like a coordinated institutional response to a presidential personnel decision.
The bureau opened its counterintelligence case against Trump. It opened MARCH TOLL against Sessions. These moves came from FBI headquarters, not field offices acting on local tips or organic investigative leads. The code name the FBI chose for its broader Trump-Russia probe has itself drawn scrutiny from critics who argue the bureau's own internal branding revealed bias.
The declassified records released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force now allow the public to see what was hidden for years. Breitbart's reporting on the declassified documents highlights the role of the HuffPost article in the FBI's predication, a detail that underscores how willing the bureau was to treat partisan media coverage as investigative fuel.
Federal investigations require a factual predicate. The FBI's own guidelines, set out in the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, demand an "articulable factual basis" before agents can open a full investigation. For MARCH TOLL, that basis consisted of two items: a letter from Democratic senators who openly accused Sessions of perjury, and a news article from a left-leaning outlet.
Neither item contained original evidence. The senators' letter cited Sessions's public testimony and drew its own conclusions. The news article did the same. The FBI treated political opinion and media commentary as if they were witness statements or documentary evidence.
This is the same FBI that, during the same period, relied on the Steele dossier to obtain surveillance warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page. The pattern is consistent: the bureau accepted opposition-research products and partisan materials as grounds to investigate people in Trump's orbit, then spent months or years chasing leads that produced nothing.
Comey himself has remained publicly combative toward Trump even as federal charges have loomed over the former FBI director. The contrast is hard to miss: the man who oversaw an agency that opened baseless probes into the president and the attorney general now faces his own legal exposure.
Sessions had already recused himself from the Russia investigation on March 2, 2017, four days before he supplemented his testimony. His recusal removed him from any supervisory role over the FBI's Russia-related work and opened the door for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Mueller as special counsel on May 17, 2017, one week after MARCH TOLL opened.
The recusal was itself a point of intense frustration for Trump, who publicly stated that he would not have nominated Sessions had he known Sessions would step aside. But the declassified records show that even recusal was not enough to shield Sessions from the FBI's investigative appetite. The bureau probed him anyway, treating his confirmation testimony as a potential crime even after he clarified it voluntarily.
The broader effort to preserve records from this era has also generated legal conflict. Former CIA Director John Brennan filed suit against the Trump administration to force preservation of investigation records, a move that reflects the ongoing battle over what the intelligence community knew, did, and authorized during the Russia probe.
MARCH TOLL opened on a political letter and a news clipping. It ran for a year. It found nothing. It closed quietly. No FBI official has faced discipline for opening it. No public accounting has been offered for why the bureau believed a corrected confirmation answer, flagged by partisan senators, warranted a full criminal investigation of the attorney general.
The declassified records do not identify by name the FBI officials who authorized MARCH TOLL's opening. The documents state that the probe was initiated "at the direction of FBI headquarters," a phrase that points upward in the chain of command without specifying who gave the order. Investigators will need to determine whether Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, or other senior officials played a direct role in greenlighting the case.
The American public deserves answers on that question. When the FBI can open a criminal probe of the attorney general based on a HuffPost article and a letter from two senators, something in the system has broken. The question is whether anyone will be held responsible for breaking it.
Declassification is doing what years of congressional hearings could not: showing the public, in the FBI's own words, how the bureau weaponized its authority against the people Americans elected to lead them. The facts in these records speak plainly enough. Whether Washington listens is another matter entirely.
