The Trump administration has released 71 previously classified Presidential Daily Briefs revealing that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush received specific, repeated intelligence warnings that Usama bin Laden's network was planning to hijack commercial jets and strike American soil, years before the attacks came.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe authorized the release on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, calling it an act of transparency meant to honor the nearly 3,000 people killed that day. The documents, described as the CIA's single largest release of declassified presidential briefings, lay bare what two administrations knew, and when they knew it, about al-Qaeda's plans to turn airliners into weapons.
The picture they paint is damning. As early as September 1998, a Presidential Daily Brief warned Clinton that bin Laden's terror network, the same group behind the East Africa embassy bombings, could "fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city." Three months later, a December 4, 1998 briefing carried a headline that left little room for ambiguity: "Bin Laden Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft."
That December brief, Fox News Digital reported, told Clinton directly:
"Some members of the bin Ladin network have received hijack training, according to various sources, but no group directly tied to bin Ladin's al-Qa'ida organization has ever carried out an aircraft hijacking. Bin Ladin could be weighing other types of operations against US aircraft."
The intelligence community was not guessing. It was warning. And the warnings did not stop.
The declassified documents show that Clinton's intelligence apparatus began flagging bin Laden's ambitions well before the embassy bombings in East Africa that summer. A February 1998 presidential briefing, Breitbart reported, was entitled "Terrorists seeking WMD capability" and specifically mentioned "bin Ladin and other Islamic extremists."
By September 10, 1998, a PDB memorandum went further: bin Laden's preferred option was to strike on U.S. soil, specifically in Washington, D.C. The brief warned that the network responsible for the embassy bombings could possibly fly a plane packed with explosives into an American city.
Throughout that year, U.S. intelligence agencies tracked bin Laden's movements and his support system. They identified al-Qaeda associates and sympathizers operating across New York, California, Texas, Michigan, and Florida. The threat was not abstract or overseas. It was domestic, distributed, and growing.
The documents also reveal that operatives conducted a trial run at an unidentified New York airport roughly three years before the September 11 attacks, evading security checks in the process. The newly declassified files show Clinton's team had access to this intelligence, yet no sufficient preventive action followed.
Clinton himself acknowledged the failure years later. In a September 2006 appearance on Fox News Sunday, he said plainly: "I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it."
The warnings carried over into the Bush administration. On August 6, 2001, barely five weeks before the attacks, a Presidential Daily Brief delivered to President Bush stated that al-Qaeda members, including some who were U.S. citizens, had lived in or traveled to the United States for years. The brief said the group "apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."
That same document noted that the FBI had uncovered patterns of suspicious activity inside the United States consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks. It flagged recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. And it carried a chilling line about bin Laden's personal intent:
"After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington."
Weeks before September 11, another daily brief told Bush that the FBI was conducting approximately 70 field investigations throughout the country that it believed were connected to bin Laden. Seventy active investigations, and the dots still were not connected in time.
The documents also reveal that plotters intended to use hijacked flights as leverage to demand the release of imprisoned extremists Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and Ramzi Yousef. The intelligence community knew who the players were, what they wanted, and how they planned to get it.
What remains unanswered, and what the declassified files do not resolve, is what specific actions either administration took in direct response to these warnings. The documents show the information flowing in. They do not show what flowed out.
CIA Director Ratcliffe framed the release not as a political act but as a debt owed. In a statement posted on X, he wrote:
"Today I authorized the release of 71 Presidential Daily Briefs to honor the lives of those killed on 9/11, along with CIA officers who subsequently gave their lives to the fight."
Ratcliffe described the disclosure as an "act of exceptional transparency." The National Archives also released interviews with national security officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations as part of the broader effort.
The document release fits a pattern. In his second term, Trump has also declassified files related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The common thread is a willingness to open the government's filing cabinets on episodes where official secrecy has long fueled public distrust.
Former U.S. counterterrorism official Javed Ali, who served at both the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, said in a Fox News interview that while America is safer from a 9/11-style attack today, the current threats are harder to detect. The nature of the danger has changed, but the question of whether government is any better at acting on what it knows has not gone away.
The 25th anniversary ceremony at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City drew former Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Barack Obama. For the families gathered at the reflecting pools, people like Matt Dunleavy, who attended with his daughter Ellie, the anniversary is personal, not political. But the declassified record now makes clear that the government they trusted had more warning than it ever publicly admitted.
Bill Clinton, now 80, has remained a visible public figure in his post-presidency, though his legacy continues to draw scrutiny on multiple fronts. The Clinton Foundation has faced its own controversies over the years, and the broader Clinton political apparatus remains a frequent subject of criticism from the right.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration's posture toward the Clintons extends beyond declassification. Trump has taken his lawsuit against Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court, part of a long-running legal effort that reflects the depth of the political divide between the two camps.
The declassified record does not accuse Clinton or Bush of ignoring warnings out of malice. But it eliminates the defense of ignorance. Both men received specific, actionable intelligence, names, methods, locations, even a trial run at an American airport, and the attacks happened anyway.
Some of the open questions may never be answered. Which New York airport hosted the trial run? What did the 70 FBI field investigations actually find? Did anyone in either White House read the September 1998 warning about an explosive-packed airplane and order a concrete response? The documents released so far do not say.
What they do say is enough. The intelligence community told two presidents, in writing, that bin Laden's network had trained hijackers, was operating inside the United States, and intended to strike American cities with commercial aircraft. The system produced the warning. The system failed to produce the response.
Twenty-five years later, the families at Ground Zero finally have the paper trail. Whether accountability follows is another matter, but at least the secrecy is over.