The Trump administration released 71 previously classified presidential daily briefs showing that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were warned, repeatedly and specifically, that Usama bin Laden's network planned to hijack commercial aircraft and strike American cities.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe authorized the release on Friday as part of a broader push to shed light on what U.S. intelligence agencies knew before the September 11, 2001 attacks. The documents include high-level CIA memorandums dating back to 1998 that described hijack training, trial runs at a New York airport, and al-Qaeda operatives already living inside the United States. Nearly 3,000 people died that day. The briefs that landed on two presidents' desks in the years before make clear the warnings were neither vague nor ambiguous.

Ratcliffe posted a statement on X explaining his decision:

"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."

Clinton received explicit hijack warnings as early as September 1998

The earliest and most striking document in the batch is a presidential daily brief dated September 10, 1998, delivered to President Clinton more than three full years before the attacks. That memorandum warned that bin Laden's preferred option was to strike on U.S. soil, specifically in Washington, D.C. It went further: the terror network responsible for the East Africa embassy bombings could possibly fly a plane packed with explosives into an American city.

Less than three months later, a December 4, 1998 brief carried a headline that left little room for misunderstanding. The New York Post reported the brief was titled "Bin Laden Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft." The document stated plainly:

"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."

That brief also noted that operatives had conducted a trial run at an unidentified New York airport roughly three years before 9/11, evading security checks in the process. Bin Laden associates and sympathizers were identified as operating in New York, California, Texas, Michigan, and Florida throughout 1998.

The intelligence community was tracking real people in real states. The Clinton administration received this information in writing, at the highest classification level, delivered directly to the president's desk. What action, if any, followed those warnings remains one of the unanswered questions the documents do not resolve.

Bush's August 2001 brief flagged al-Qaeda's U.S. support network

President George W. Bush received his own detailed warning on August 6, 2001, just 36 days before the attacks. That presidential daily brief noted that al-Qaeda members, including some who were U.S. citizens, had resided in or traveled to the United States for years. The group maintained what the brief called "a support structure that could aid attacks."

The same document recorded that bin Laden had told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington after U.S. missile strikes hit his base in Afghanistan in 1998. And the FBI had uncovered patterns of suspicious activity inside the country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks. Recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York was also flagged.

In the weeks immediately before September 11, a separate daily brief informed Bush that the FBI was conducting around 70 field investigations across the country believed to be related to bin Laden. Seventy active investigations, and still the plot succeeded.

The Trump administration's willingness to release long-classified government records stands in contrast to the instincts of prior administrations. In his second term, President Trump has also released classified files on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., part of a pattern of forcing sunlight onto material the national security establishment long preferred to keep sealed.

Former Bush adviser acknowledged the failure

The documents carry added weight because former officials have acknowledged, in retrospect, that the system failed. Former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who served under Bush, was quoted in reporting on the release:

"Those of us in authority on that day did not see the nature of the danger in time to prevent the attack of 9/11."

That admission, set against the specificity of the warnings now made public, raises an uncomfortable question: What does it take for a warning to be specific enough? The September 1998 brief described a plane packed with explosives flown into a city. The December 1998 brief named hijack training. The August 2001 brief identified a domestic support network and active FBI investigations. The intelligence community connected the dots on paper. The people who received those papers did not act on them in time.

The plotters themselves had specific goals. The declassified files reveal that hijacked flights were intended, in part, to leverage demands for the release of imprisoned extremists Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and Ramzi Yousef. The ambitions of the network were operational and concrete, not theoretical.

Ratcliffe's release coincides with the 25th anniversary

The timing of the release was deliberate. September 11, 2026 marked the 25th anniversary of the attacks. A ceremony was held at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City, where attendees including Matt Dunleavy and his daughter Ellie visited the reflecting pools. Former Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama also attended.

For the families who lost someone that day, the declassified briefs offer something more painful than closure. They offer specificity. The intelligence agencies knew enough to write it down, classify it at the highest level, and hand it to the president of the United States, twice, under two administrations. The question of what those administrations did with that intelligence is one the documents themselves do not fully answer.

Former counterterrorism official Javed Ali, who served at both the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, has said that America is safer today from a 9/11-style attack but that current threats are harder to detect. That assessment may be true. But the declassified record now shows that the original threat was not hard to detect at all. It was detected. It was briefed. It was filed.

The broader pattern, of government agencies collecting critical intelligence that senior leaders fail to act on, or that bureaucracies bury, is not confined to counterterrorism. Whether the subject is FBI leadership priorities or the conduct of individuals operating as unregistered foreign agents, the same institutional reflex recurs: collect the information, classify it, and hope no one ever reads it.

Seventy-one briefs, two presidents, zero accountability

The 71 presidential daily briefs now in the public record span the Clinton and Bush years. They document a threat that was named, tracked, briefed, and ignored at the highest levels of American government. No one in either administration has faced formal accountability for the failure to act on warnings that proved devastatingly accurate.

Ratcliffe framed the release as a tribute to the dead. It is that. But it is also an indictment, not of the intelligence officers who gathered the information and wrote the briefs, but of the leaders who received them and let September 11 happen anyway.

The American people were kept in the dark for a quarter-century. The men who owed them answers attended the memorial last week. The documents they sat on for decades finally speak for themselves.