Terry Strada stood feet from four former presidents and told them they betrayed her family for 25 years.
That same day, the CIA declassified proof that two of those same presidents sat on warnings a hijacked plane was coming.
Newly released documents show exactly how much Clinton and Bush knew before the towers fell.
CIA Drops Largest 9/11 Intelligence Release in Agency History
CIA Director John Ratcliffe released 71 Presidential Daily Briefs on the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
The documents span February 1998 through the morning of September 12, 2001.
A September 1998 brief told Bill Clinton that bin Laden's preferred option was to strike inside Washington, D.C.
The same report raised the possibility that his network could fly an explosives-packed plane into an American city.
Three years before the towers fell, Clinton had that warning sitting on his desk.
The documents also reveal a trial run at a New York airport, where operatives tested airport security years ahead of the attacks.
They did it in plain sight, and nobody stopped them.
By 2001, the warnings landed on George W. Bush's desk instead.
An August 6, 2001 brief told Bush that al-Qaeda members had lived in the US for years and had built a support structure capable of pulling off an attack.
The same memo said the FBI was already running roughly 70 field investigations tied to bin Laden inside American cities.
Weeks later, nearly 3,000 Americans were dead.
Ratcliffe Calls It an Act of Exceptional Transparency
Ratcliffe called the release "an act of exceptional transparency."
This is not Ratcliffe's first mass declassification.
In 2025, his agency released files tied to the JFK and RFK assassinations under a Trump executive order demanding "maximum transparency."
That same year, it also declassified an internal review admitting the 2016 Russia assessment had been rushed and shaped by a politically charged environment.
Three different secrets, three separate releases, one CIA director.
The pattern is consistent – Washington sat on the truth, and it took Trump's CIA to hand it back to the American people.
Same Day, a Grieving Widow Confronts the Men Who Held the Warnings
While the country was still digesting the documents, four former presidents stood together at Ground Zero.
Terry Strada, whose husband Tom died in the towers, looked at Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden and did not hold back.
She told them, one by one, that every administration since 9/11 had chosen to protect Saudi Arabia instead of standing with the families who lost everything.
A man who lost his aunt in the attacks stood up too, accusing the government of concealing the truth for a quarter century.
Strada turned to Vice President Vance and asked him to carry her message back to the president.
Then she said the line the room won't forget – "President Trump, you're our last hope."
She asked him to release the unredacted files before the families still alive today run out of time to see them.
The Saudi File Washington Still Won't Release
Here's what should make every American furious – two different presidents had this exact threat in writing, and thousands of Americans still died.
The CIA's own documents settle that part of the story.
What's left is the part nobody has released yet – the Saudi connection.
The families are still asking for records tied to Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national the FBI identified in 2022 documents as an agent of Saudi intelligence.
That file has never been made public.
Strada made it clear in front of the cameras exactly who she's counting on to finish the job.
The declassified briefs already show what Washington knew before the attack.
The next release could show who Washington protected after it.
Sources:
- Louis Casiano, "Clinton, Bush received multiple warnings on bin Laden hijack plots before 9/11, declassified files show," Fox News, September 11, 2026.
- "9/11 victim families blast Bush, Obama, Biden for alleged Saudi Arabia coverup at memorial," KOMO News, September 11, 2026.
- Emily Kopp, "Newly released: Chilling CIA documents reveal warnings about a terror plot that preceded 9/11," Daily Caller News Foundation, September 11, 2026.
- "CIA Unveils 54 New Files On RFK Assassination," Yahoo News, June 12, 2025.
- "CIA Director John Ratcliffe Declassifies Internal Tradecraft Review of 2016 Election ICA to Promote Analytic Objectivity and Transparency," CIA.gov, July 2, 2025.
