Trump attorney says FBI would not let her see raid warrant, probable cause has been sealed

As the blowback over the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home continues to mount, new information has emerged suggesting that the raid was sparked by something trivial, which would be a major problem.

Numerous pundits have warned that unless the Justice Department had significant justification for the raid, it could turn out to have been “the dumbest and most inadvertently destructive political gambit in the recent history of this country.”

And indeed, that’s what new evidence suggests it was.

The Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday that the raid was motivated “in part” by the belief that “additional classified information remained at [Trump’s home] after the National Archives retrieved more than a dozen boxes of White House documents from the resort earlier this year.”

But if it was just a matter of documents, why didn’t the feds just request a subpoena? Why instead did they raid Trump’s home?

According to The Washington Post, in January the National Archives and Records Administration “retrieved 15 boxes of documents and other items from Mar-a-Lago that Archives officials said should have been turned over when Trump left the White House.”

Among the items were “letters and notes from foreign leaders, such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un,” in addition to “a cocktail napkin, a phone list, charts, slide decks, letters, memos, maps, talking points, a birthday dinner menu, schedules and more.”

There was also some classified material.

Following this, federal investigators reportedly visited the property in June to talk about turning over more classified material.

“At the beginning of the meeting, Trump stopped by and greeted the investigators near a dining room. After he left, without answering any questions, the investigators asked the attorneys if they could see where Trump was storing the documents. The attorneys took the investigators to the basement room where the boxes of materials were being stored, and the investigators looked around the room before eventually leaving,” CNN reported, citing an unnamed source.

“A second source said that Trump came in to say hi and made small talk but left while the attorneys spoke with investigators. The source said some of the documents shown to investigators had top secret markings. Five days later, on June 8, Trump’s attorneys received a letter from investigators asking them to further secure the room where the documents were stored. Aides subsequently added a padlock to the room.”

But despite Trump’s attorneys abiding by the investigators’ requests, “the Justice Department and FBI felt they weren’t getting the same cooperation they had been receiving earlier in the probe,” and so they filed for a search warrant, according to Fox News.

Next came the raid, which occurred on Monday. Speaking on Real America’s Voice this Tuesday, Trump’s personal attorney Christina Bobb said that she was allowed to briefly view the warrant during the raid and that it looked “thin.”

“They did not give me a copy of it right away, but they did let me see it. It was very, I would say, thin. And as you can tell from public records, the affidavit, the supporting documentation of what the probable cause was to obtain the warrant, has been sealed,” she said.

“They also said that they were looking for classified documents, evidence of a crime as far as classified documents go. So they were looking for both classified information that they think should not have been removed from the White House as well as presidential records.”

She added that it was ironic and ultimately made no sense.

“The irony of both, if you want to call it that, is that it is the president himself who gets to decide what is a presidential record. So why they get to redefine that is unclear. And why they get to search, why that’s even in a warrant, it doesn’t really even make any sense,” she said.

She’s not the only one who’s made this point that the allegations of criminality don’t fit the seriousness of what happened.

“One perplexing aspect of the Mar-a-Lago search, at least to some legal analysts, is that the crime reportedly being investigated does not seem to match the unprecedented tactic of an FBI search of a former president’s residence,” Politico noted in a report.

Politico also obtained a stunning quote from an unnamed legal expert who said, “If they raided his home just to find classified documents he took from The White House, he will be re-elected president in 2024, hands down. It will prove to be the greatest law enforcement mistake in history.”

Phew.

Liberal journalist Matt Taibbi added on Substack that “if underlying this action there isn’t a very substantial there there, the Biden administration just took the world’s most reputable police force and turned it into the American version of the Tonton Macoute on national television. We may be looking at simultaneously the dumbest and most inadvertently destructive political gambit in the recent history of this country.”

So far the “there there” just appears to be classified documents and presidential records, neither of which, critics say, would justify raiding a former president’s home …

Vivek Saxena

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