Jul 27, 2025 minute read

Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board Devin Nunes says it’s now clear what federal agents were really after during the Mar-a-Lago raid nearly three years ago: classified documents related to the discredited Trump-Russia investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane.

In an interview on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, Nunes, now chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, said the Biden administration was desperate to stop then-candidate Donald Trump from returning to office—and the Mar-a-Lago raid was part of that effort.

“Whatever they were looking for, they clearly couldn’t find,” Nunes said. “They were trying to stop President Trump from being reelected.”

Nunes pointed to newly released documents from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which he said had long been suppressed. Among them is a 45-page report analyzing Russia’s actual preferences during the 2016 election—evidence Nunes claims undermines the core premise of the Russia collusion narrative.

“We went through every single piece of intelligence that existed,” Nunes said. “If anything, it was clear that if Putin was going to do anything, he probably wanted Hillary Clinton to win.”

Nunes said the report had been blocked from public release for years and is now finally being declassified. “As chairman of the president’s intelligence board, I’m going to try to get out as much of this information as possible and get it declassified,” he said.

When asked directly whether he believed the FBI raided Trump’s Florida home in order to retrieve this intelligence report, Nunes replied, “It had to be one of the things they were looking for. That report is damning if people take the time to read it.”

Trump himself announced Friday that the documents taken during the Mar-a-Lago raid in the Jack Smith-led classified documents case have now been returned.

“The Department of Justice has just returned the boxes that Deranged Jack Smith made such a big deal about,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “They are being brought down to Florida and will someday be part of the Trump Presidential Library. Justice finally won out.”

The raid took place on August 8, 2022, and was widely slammed by the GOP as politically motivated. At the time, the Biden administration denied any involvement in the decision to execute the search warrant.

Nunes also praised the Justice Department’s recent creation of a “strike force” to investigate misconduct within the intelligence community and the DOJ.

“There’s a lot more to do with this,” he said.