Tipsheet

Here's the Woman Who Launched the FBI Ransacking of Mar-a-Lago

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  August 24, 2022 6:00 AM

Donald Trump is the victim of a political hit job by the Biden Department of Justice. He didn’t commit any actual law violations as stipulated in the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. Federal officials fought to keep the affidavit providing probable cause for the FBI’s August 8 raid under seal. Still, a judge, the same one who signed off on the search, Bruce Reinhart, disagreed and ordered parts of the document to be released after a redaction process. That means a sea of blacked-out pages, so what’s the point? The best part regarding the reasoning behind keeping the core of the affidavit under wraps is to protect Donald Trump. Nothing is creepier than when the government says, “this is for your protection.”

With every development regarding this federal ransacking, two things remain unchanged. It looks increasingly clear that the Trump legal team was cooperating with federal officials regarding the documents in question, so the obstruction of justice allegation gets weaker by the day. Second, where is the crime that precipitated this search of Trump’s home because recent updates only make it seem like the Justice Department cobbled together statutes that aren’t criminal to justify this ransacking? 

The latest development in this legal fiasco is Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall's role in the document retrieval, where she seems to be one of the leading figures who triggered the FBI raid. As Tom Elliott of Grabien clipped, Trump honored this woman during his presidency, which he cited as a failure on the former president’s part for not draining the swamp (via WaPo):

Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall also notified Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran that the agency would provide the FBI access to 15 boxes of materials in order to investigate “whether those records were handled in an unlawful manner" and conduct an assessment to determine if any damage might have resulted from the improper handling of materials, according to the May 10 letter.

[…]

“As the Department of Justice’s National Security Division explained to you on April 29, 2022: ‘There are important national security interests in the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community getting access to these materials. According to NARA, among the materials in the boxes are over 100 documents with classification markings, comprising more than 700 pages. Some include the highest levels of classification, including Special Access Program (SAP) materials,’” Steidel Wall wrote.

The FBI removed an additional 20 boxes of items from the Mar-a-Lago Club earlier this month, including four sets of top-secret documents and seven other sets of classified information, according to a written inventory of the items seized in the high-profile search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.

[…]

Trump’s lawyers sent letters on April 29 and May 1, according to Steidel Wall’s account, to delay the production of the materials to the FBI so that Trump could decide whether to assert executive privilege over the materials. John Solomon, a writer who also serves as one of Trump’s representatives to the National Archives, first posted the text of the letter on Monday.

Steidel Wall ultimately rebuffed their request after consulting with the Department of Justice.

“The question in this case is not a close one,” Steidel Wall wrote. “The Executive Branch here is seeking access to records belonging to, and in the custody of, the Federal Government itself, not only in order to investigate whether those records were handled in an unlawful manner but also, as the National Security Division explained, to ‘conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported and take any necessary remedial steps.’”

Let’s circle back to what Mike Davis, ex-law clerk to Justice Neil Gorsuch, has said about this case. The president can declassify anything he wants, the regulations regarding classification do not apply to the office of the presidency, and the fact that Trump took documents that are considered highly sensitive is, in effect, a declassifying act. What isn’t marginalized is that Trump declassified troves of documents relating to Crossfire Hurricane. Then federal agents busted down the doors of Mar-a-Lago looking for more classified materials, including reported nuclear secrets, which everyone knew was an exaggeration. We know more about the people who lit the fuse for this heinous act of DOJ overreach.