The Biden Justice Department said the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was narrowly defined. It was the highest priority because sensitive materials, including potential nuclear secrets, were at the residence. Attorney General Merrick Garland offered a presser to try to defend this arguably unlawful raid and killed his credibility and that of the Justice Department in the process. That’s a little unfair—the DOJ’s credibility was already in the negative, but this raid ensured it would never recover for at least a generation. The DOJ and the FBI have become the Biden political Gestapo.
Was the ransacking narrowly defined? They took documents protected by executive privilege. The FBI took Trump’s passports—and records protected under attorney-client privilege. As we’ve noted, it wasn’t a narrow search. It was a catch-all fishing expedition that netted the DOJ nothing. The FBI returned the passports, chalking it up to a mistake—and now it’s been confirmed that federal agents did abscond with attorney-client protected documents (via NBC News):
Some of the documents recovered during the FBI's search of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort "potentially contain attorney-client privileged information," Justice Department lawyers said Monday.
The Justice Department acknowledged the find in a submission to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who's weighing a request from Trump's team to appoint a special master to review some of the documents the FBI seized as part of its national security-related criminal investigation.
In an order Saturday, Cannon instructed the Justice Department to file under seal “a more detailed Receipt for Property specifying all property seized” and said that she wanted to be told “the status of Defendant’s review of the seized property, including any filter review conducted by the privilege review team and any dissemination of materials beyond the privilege review team.”
The judge said over the weekend that her “preliminary intent” is to grant Trump’s request for a special master, but that she would not rule until she hears the government’s arguments at a hearing in West Palm Beach on Thursday.
If Cannon grants Trump’s request, the special master would be in charge of reviewing documents for issues of privilege, not the highly sensitive records at the heart of the government’s investigation.
A judge granted the initial motion to appoint a special master to review all the files seized by federal agents, though, as Spencer wrote today, the DOJ said they checked them all already. The Director of National Intelligence is also going to conduct a classification review. It’s a merry-go-round narrative that ends with “who cares.” Trump declassified the documents that you know the feds thought they could get him on, hence the radio silence on that front. The president is the ultimate authority on declassifying sensitive materials, unlike Hillary Clinton’s unsecured and unauthorized setup regarding how she handled classified information.
Also, what’s with this June 8 letter from the DOJ that instructed Trump’s lawyers to keep all documents reportedly in question at Mar-a-Lago? This wasn’t about documents—you all know that. It was the last attempt to find anything felonious to stop Trump from running as if that was a real obstacle. A DC-based grand jury is going to indict him on something soon. Just be prepared for that bit of prosecutorial overreach.