The files coming out, 2021–2026

On 3 September 2021, eight days before the 20th anniversary, President Biden signed Executive Order 14040. It set deadlines: the 2016 FBI memo that had been withheld in full from the families’ lawsuit, by 11 September 2021; within 60 days, everything withheld as classified in their lawsuit; within 120 days, the records from the FBI’s original investigation, known as PENTTBOM, that mention the people later investigated; and within 180 days, records from any other FBI inquiry into them. [1]

The releases did not stop at the deadlines. The FBI’s public index now lists more than 30 entries: the 2016 memo, numbered parts, release notes, updates and a run of supplemental releases. [2] The redaction key printed on each release shows why passages are still blacked out: information from foreign governments withheld at their direction, material that needs a judge’s permission, bank secrecy rules, and privacy. [4]

The first document out, on 11 September 2021, was the April 2016 Operation Encore memo. It describes the FBI’s follow-up investigation of Fahad al-Thumairy, Omar al-Bayoumi and others who had contact with the first two hijackers in California. See the Bayoumi file. [3]

In 2004 the 9/11 Commission described Bayoumi as “a devout Muslim, obliging and gregarious,” and found no evidence he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups. [1]

The released files tell a harder story. Two 2017 FBI memos say that from the late 1990s until 9/11, Bayoumi was paid a monthly stipend as a co-optee, a part-time agent, of Saudi intelligence. The Justice Department had withheld them as state secrets; they became public in 2022, and one was filed in the families’ case in February 2023. [2][3] FBI agents who had worked the case told ProPublica they saw those memos for the first time only when they were released. [2] A later supplemental release includes a September 2002 memo to the FBI’s legal attaché, from a sender whose name is redacted, listing money transfers from a Saudi bank into Bayoumi’s Bank of America account. [4]

ProPublica also reported that two witnesses the FBI learned of in 2007 said Thumairy, the imam at a Saudi-built mosque in Culver City, arranged for the hijackers to be driven to their first meeting with Bayoumi, which undercuts Bayoumi’s claim that they met by chance. [2]

About a week after the attacks, at the FBI’s request, British police arrested Bayoumi in Birmingham and searched his home and office. They took boxes of papers, computer disks, an address book and more than 80 videotapes. Among them were a diagram in his handwriting that appeared to calculate an airplane’s path to a point on the horizon, and a video of him describing the U.S. Capitol. [1]

According to ProPublica, the FBI received full copies, including mirror images of the computers. But in May 2002 the San Diego office was asked to review only five of the tapes, two of them duplicates showing a paintball game and a family trip to SeaWorld. A British police investigator who questioned Bayoumi said the FBI never told him Bayoumi had been investigated in San Diego in 1998. An FBI agent later got copies of some of the papers, including the flight diagram, only when someone in Washington called to ask whether he wanted old evidence that was about to be destroyed. [1]

In May 2025 two senators, a Democrat and a Republican, asked the FBI director why the Capitol video and the sketch were never given to the 9/11 Commission or the CIA. [2] In September 2026 Attorney General Todd Blanche said more records would come out and that “the reason that we’re not releasing documents has nothing to do with protecting any government or any entity.” [3]

The FBI closed the follow-up investigation, the one that produced the 2016 memo, in 2021; the executive order itself refers to the document closing it. [1] ProPublica reported that FBI headquarters had pressed for years to shut it down, and that the team was disbanded in 2016. [2]

Three things remain open. First, why evidence seized from Bayoumi in 2001 did not reach the agents investigating him, the Commission or the CIA. No public record explains it. [2] Second, what the still-redacted passages say. The families say the withheld material shows Saudi government involvement; the attorney general says it is being withheld only because it is genuinely classified. [3] Third, whether a court will ever weigh the evidence. At the appeal hearing on 7 October 2026 the judges stuck to whether Saudi Arabia can be sued at all, and lawyers in the case did not expect a ruling before early 2027. [4] See the lawsuit file and the 28 pages.