A new report alleges that the CIA under former President Barack Obama was behind the baseless plan to tie former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign to Russia, and intelligence officials are now racing to find a binder with details about how the plan was implemented.

A binder stored in a secret Washington, D.C. location and since declassified by Trump as president may now be missing, threatening to reveal how the intelligence community allegedly identified 26 Trump associates who the FBI targeted for suspicious activities as part of its investigation into Russian activity in the 2016 election. Sources close to the U.S. House's investigation of the matter first came forward to reporters Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag.

As the report details, former CIA Director John Brennan ordered the "Five Eyes" international intelligence alliance -- the other four consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom -- to spy on these 26 individuals who were “people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate,” according to a source who spoke with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, led by Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio).

In the world of covert operations, "bumping" refers to a manufactured encounter between a target and an operative in order to gain valuable intelligence.

“They were targets of our own IC and law enforcement — targets for collection and misinformation,” the source said, according to the New York Post .

The British intelligence arm, known as Government Communications Headquarters or BGCH, had made contact with some of the 26 Trump associates as early as March 2016, according to the new report.

“They were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” a source told the outlet. “They were sending people around the UK, Australia, Italy — the Mossad in Italy. The MI6 was working at an intelligence school they had set up.”

A spokesman for the British spy agency told the reporters that the assertion it was “asked to conduct ‘wire tapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense.”

Efforts by the Five Eyes were accumulated in a "10-inch binder" that has since disappeared.

Speaking with Jesse Watters on Fox News, Shellenberger said a forthcoming report will have more to say.

"There has been widespread speculation that this binder was the reason, or a reason, for the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, and we'll be discussing that tomorrow," he said.

 "But obviously if this binder contains what we have been told it contains, which may include raw intelligence, information showing that the U.S. government, the CIA, the intelligence community of the U.S. government, initiated the Russia collusion hoax, that it did not occur in the official story, including in the way the Durham investigation had portrayed it, then that's extremely serious information and it may be if the FBI went then to go get it in order to continue the coverup of the disinformation, then it obviously adds an even more dramatic wrinkle to this."

In 2023, special counsel John Durham released the results of a multi-year investigation concluding the connection between President Trump's campaign and Russia was not substantive, contradicting a wall of media coverage that attempted to damage his 2016 election prospects. Other elements of the baseless allegation, including a letter signed by 50 former intelligence officials and allegedly orchestrated by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken calling Hunter Biden's laptop a product of "Russian disinformation," have since been revealed.