Kash Patel Now Examining the FBI's Dark Files, the Hidden History of the Deep State

Kash Patel Now Examining the FBI's Dark Files, the Hidden History of the Deep State

EXCLUSIVE: The FBI's Secret Stash Finally Uncovered

For a generation, the FBI has kept a second set of books called 'prohibited access' files. After a long fight, they're finally being examined.

Matt Taibbi
Mar 06, 2026

A Federal Bureau of Investigation task force has begun excavating the separate set of books FBI keeps using an inaccessible "prohibited access" file designation, according to multiple government sources. Though an internal fight over how to handle the files continues, embattled FBI Director Kash Patel has assigned personnel to examine decades of hidden history, Racket News has learned, with some files already turned over to Congress.

"This is it -- the deep state," one of the sources said.

Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, whose work with whistleblowers and pressure across years was key to prying prohibited access files loose, expressed cautious optimism.

"If it weren't for whistleblower disclosures to my office, the very existence of the FBI using 'Prohibited Access' files for some investigations would have remained in the dark," he said. "I've asked Attorney General Bondi and Director Patel to turn over certain Prohibited Access records to Congress. I've received some, but am still waiting on others. I urge the DOJ and FBI to keep digging -- which previous administrations apparently didn't make any effort to do -- so that the facts can come to light. The FBI's secret stash of records is scandalous."

Files given a prohibited access designation are not merely secret. They are "ghosts" which "do not exist," records rigged to return false negatives when searched for in the FBI's SENTINEL system. They're digital descendants of paper records that as far back as Richard Nixon's presidency were kept in locked offices, accessible to just a few officials, typically at the deputy director level and above. Currently, the number of people with the ability to access the files can be counted on one hand.

The implications of the nation's chief federal law enforcement and counter-intelligence organization having kept a separate, non-searchable filing system are mind-boggling.

"It's not like turning over a rock and finding a few bugs," said retired FBI Supervisory Analyst George Hill. "It's like turning over a manhole and finding a whole city."

"You don't run a Constitutional republic on secret files," added legal analyst Margot Cleveland.

A current government source said the prohibited access designation is "literally designed to hide files from Congress and from the FBI itself. It's really frigging bad."

Off-books surveillance and "disruption" of political figures in the Arctic Frost and Trump-Russia investigations comprise part of the find, but the files extend at least as far back as 1999, across Democratic and Republican Party presidencies, involving as many as a thousand distinct case numbers. There are no rules for passing access to the system from one administration to the next. Instead, operation of prohibited access files is described as an oral tradition passed down among senior FBI officials, independent of agents below and political appointees above in Congress and even the White House.

Here's how the files came to light:

A week and a half ago, on February 25th, Patel mentioned prohibited access files in a statement given to Reuters in a story about Joe Biden's FBI obtaining subpoenas of phone records for Patel and current White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in 2022 and 2023. Patel called it "outrageous" and "deeply alarming" that the previous administration had him and Wiles investigated, "using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight." He told Reuters he'd "recently ended" the FBI's use of the prohibited designation.

At the outset of the second Trump presidency, neither Patel nor then-Deputy Director Dan Bongino knew how to access the files. "Nobody said, 'Okay, this is how the FBI runs. This is what we do. This is how we hide things,'" is how one source put it.

The bureau has supposedly located all of the "prohibited" files, but the scope of the problem remains unknown, in part because in addition to the prohibited files, the bureau has a problem with what one source called "the shit on paper," which might involve field offices as well as its Washington headquarters. Added a former FBI agent: "There are files in offices and at headquarters that reside either in a safe or in a locked drawer somewhere or hidden within Sentinel."

An extraordinary aspect of this tale -- as Racket's Ryan Lovelace will soon report in more detail -- is that the Justice Department Inspector General has known about the existence of the prohibited access designation since at least 2021. He also obtained a 2023 FBI user manual for its SENTINEL GOLD records system, not always positively reviewed by agents ("Yesterday's Technology Tomorrow," is how one former agent jokingly put it), showing "prohibited" files as one of the categories in the system. According to Racket sources, prohibited access files predate both Sentinel Gold and the original Sentinel system, which was introduced in 2012. (More on this soon.)

The files only came to be accessible to senior Trump appointees after a years-long bureaucratic battle that began with whistleblowers in the Justice Department, later was taken up by investigators in Grassley's office, and only reached the offices of Patel and Bongino last year.

Though the prohibited access issue extends to other presidencies and other problems, including potentially the systematic burying of misconduct cases involving senior FBI officials, this issue only began to leak into the public eye because of Russiagate. When congressional investigators began looking at the origins of the Steele Dossier and the behavior of the private intelligence firm Fusion-GPS, they came across apparent conflicting statements involving Nellie Ohr, a former CIA analyst and Fusion employee whose husband Bruce worked for the DOJ*.