Patel, who under Trump had been the chief of staff for the acting defense secretary, claimed in a string of interviews that Trump had declassified a trove of "Russiagate documents" in the final days of his administration. But Patel claimed Trump's White House counsel had blocked the release of those documents, and instead had them delivered to the National Archives.
"White House counsel and company disobeyed a presidential order and implemented federal governmental bureaucracy on the way out to basically send the stash to the National Archives, and now that's where it's at," Patel said in a subsequent interview on June 23 on a different pro-Trump internet show.
Trump and his allies have for years pushed aggressively to declassify materials related to the FBI's "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation that examined alleged ties between Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russia -- a probe that was later
put under the control of Robert Mueller following his appointment as special counsel. Patel, who previously served under then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) during Nunes' time as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has claimed that nonpublic information provided to Congress undercut the Russia probe and helped support Trump's claim that the investigation lacked merit.
The day before he left office, Trump authorized the declassification of a set of documents related to the Russia probe. The
memorandum, released in January 2021, acknowledged that "portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public."