The Trump administration has released 71 formerly classified Presidential Daily Briefs showing that Presidents Clinton and Bush received repeated, specific warnings that Osama bin Laden was planning to hijack American passenger jets, years before nearly 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe authorized the document release on Friday, the anniversary of the attacks, hours after former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice publicly apologized to the families of the fallen. Both former presidents attended a remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan the same day. Representatives for neither Clinton nor Bush responded to requests for comment.

The documents paint a picture of an intelligence community that saw the threat coming and told the people in charge, and of two administrations that, by their own later admissions, failed to act in time. The disclosures land as part of a broader transparency push by President Trump, who has also ordered the release of long-secret files on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Clinton's daily brief flagged an "explosive-packed airplane" three years before the attacks

The earliest and most striking warning surfaced in material prepared for Clinton's daily intelligence brief on September 10, 1998, three full years before the Twin Towers fell. The New York Post reported that the document stated bin Laden's "preferred option is to strike the US on its own soil in Washington" and that the same group behind the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania "may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city."

That was not a vague, hedged guess. It named the method, a plane loaded with explosives, the target country, and the preferred city.

By December 4, 1998, a second document prepared for Clinton's daily brief carried the headline "Bin Laden Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft." It warned that "some members of the Bin Laden network have received hijack training, according to various sources," that bin Laden "could be weighing other types of operations against US aircraft," and that he might act before the start of Ramadan on December 20. The brief added that two members of bin Laden's operational team "had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport."

A trial run at a New York airport. Hijack training confirmed by multiple sources. A timetable. And still nothing stopped what came next.

Warning after warning piled up through 1999 and 2000

The newly released files show the warnings did not stop after 1998. They accelerated. An intelligence document from July 1998 acknowledged that analysts had "received four reports from highly questionable sources suggesting Usama Bin Laden is making plans to conduct an attack in the United States." The sourcing was weak, but the pattern was unmistakable.

By February 1999, another document warned that if bin Laden succeeded in obtaining a chemical or biological weapon, "his past behavior and statements indicate he would have no reservations about using it and he would begin searching for a suitable target." The threat was no longer confined to hijackings. It had expanded to weapons of mass destruction.

A CIA memo dated July 21, 1999, went further still. It reported that bin Laden's group claimed to have "made a dry run of a bombing of the FBI headquarters" in Washington and suggested the operation would happen "soon." The CIA itself noted "reservations about the source," but the claim reached the president's desk regardless. The pattern of intelligence agencies flagging threats only to see them go unaddressed did not begin on September 11.

By February 11, 2000, Clinton's intelligence aides reported that a seized manifesto identified possible targets including the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. A separate document from the same date described bin Laden as pushing a "global drug trafficking" network to export heroin and opium to Europe and the United States as part of "his anti-West campaign."

A State Department fact sheet from December 2000 confirmed the drug connection, stating that "Afghan territory under Taliban control is now the largest producer in the world of illicit opium, which is refined into heroin," and that "narcotics-related income strengthens the Taliban's capacity to provide support for international terrorism." Bin Laden was not just plotting attacks. He was funding them through a narcotics empire, and the US government knew it.

Bush received the infamous July 2001 memo, and the FBI was already investigating

The warnings carried over into the Bush administration with no loss of urgency. On July 25, 2001, less than seven weeks before the attacks, Bush received the now-infamous Presidential Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The document stated plainly that "Al-Qa'ida members, including some who are US citizens, have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks."

It also noted that after US missile strikes on bin Laden's base in Afghanistan in 1998, "Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington." And it flagged that the FBI had found "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

By August 2001, Bush's daily brief reported that the FBI was "conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related." Seventy active investigations. The bureau was watching. The intelligence community was watching. The question the declassified record now forces into the open is what, exactly, the people receiving these briefs did with the information.

The broader pattern of declassified records exposing institutional failures at the highest levels of government has become a recurring theme of the Trump administration's transparency efforts.

Both presidents later downplayed what they knew

When Bush appeared before the bipartisan 9/11 Commission in April 2004, he claimed he had received no "actionable intelligence" related to bin Laden before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He confirmed he had seen the report suggesting hijackers could seize an airliner to secure the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, then serving a life sentence in a North Carolina federal prison, but insisted his administration had not received intelligence that passenger jets could be used as missiles.

The September 10, 1998 brief delivered to Clinton told a different story about the broader threat. It explicitly warned of "an explosive-packed airplane" being flown into a US city. Whether that document ever reached Bush's desk is not addressed in the released files. But the intelligence community had the concept on paper three years before the attacks, and the government Clinton led received it.

Clinton, for his part, defended his record in a combative September 2006 interview on Fox News Sunday. Pressed by then-host Chris Wallace, Clinton said:

"I got closer to killing [bin Laden] than anybody has gotten since. I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it."

He then turned on Wallace directly:

"You did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me."

Regret and deflection. The declassified briefs now show exactly how much Clinton's intelligence apparatus knew, and how early it knew it. The record of classified documents hidden from public accountability stretches well beyond the 9/11 files, but few cases carry stakes this high.

Rice apologized hours before the files dropped

Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush's national security adviser on September 11, issued a public apology to the families of the victims just hours before the documents were released. Her words were direct and unqualified:

"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."

She added:

"I will always carry deep personal remorse for the pain that you, the families of the fallen, still feel, and for the trauma that our country endured."

Rice's admission stands in contrast to the posture both former presidents adopted in the years after the attacks, one claiming no "actionable intelligence," the other insisting he got closer to bin Laden than anyone. The declassified record suggests the intelligence was there. Whether it was actionable depended on who was willing to act.

The Trump administration's decision to release these files fits within a broader campaign to declassify records that previous administrations kept sealed, from national security documents to files on some of the most consequential events in American history. The JFK, RFK, and MLK assassination files were released alongside the 9/11 briefs.

Ratcliffe framed the release simply:

"Today I authorized the release of 71 Presidential Daily Briefs to honor the lives of those killed on 9/11."

The families of the dead have waited nearly a quarter-century for answers that were sitting in classified folders. The question now is not whether the warnings existed, the documents prove they did. The question is why, after all this time, it took a different president to let the public see them.

Accountability delayed is accountability denied. And for nearly 3,000 families, these files arrived about twenty-four years too late.