FBI Had Concerns About Probable Cause for 2022 Mar-a-Lago Raid

FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed Tuesday that FBI officials flagged probable cause concerns with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the weeks leading up to the FBI raid targeting President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property to recover classified documents in 2022.

In response to a reporter’s statement on X that the FBI didn’t believe it had probable cause to search Trump’s Florida property, Patel responded: “It’s true.”
 

“We just turned over documents to Capitol Hill to be made public showing the FBI told DOJ they did not have probable cause for raiding President Trump’s home in Mar A Lago but DOJ ‘didn’t give a damn’ and did it anyway,” he added in his post.

Emails released Tuesday by the office of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and reviewed by The Epoch Times showed communications between the DOJ and FBI in the weeks before the search of the then-former president’s property. FBI officials, whose names were redacted, at the time had concerns about not having probable cause to search the property before the August 2022 raid. Trump was later charged in the case with retaining classified documents after leaving office.

From Amuse on X:

Probable cause is not a procedural nicety. It is the constitutional threshold that converts coercion into law enforcement. Newly disclosed internal FBI communications, now being prepared for release to Congress by Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, reportedly show that agents in the Washington Field Office warned prosecutors that probable cause was lacking before the August 2022 raid. These were not political appointees. They were career agents tasked with assessing whether the Fourth Amendment standard had been met. Their conclusion was explicit. They did not believe it had.

The Mar-a-Lago raid was wrong at its core. That claim does not rest on rhetoric, exaggeration, or partisan outrage. It rests on structure, incentives, and newly revealed facts. Once those facts are placed in order, the conclusion follows with uncomfortable clarity. Authorizing deadly force during a raid on the home of a former president, while knowing the legal basis for the raid itself was defective, was reckless, dangerous, unprecedented, and indefensible.

Begin with the most basic point. Deadly force authorization is not an abstraction. It is not a boilerplate incantation floating free of context. It is a real operational decision that alters incentives, expectations, and risk calculations for armed agents entering a confined space where other armed actors are present. When the FBI authorized deadly force for the Mar-a-Lago raid, it did so knowing several things simultaneously. It knew the target was a former president. It knew heavily armed Secret Service agents would be on site. It knew family members and staff could be present. And as recently uncovered emails now show, it knew that its own agents believed probable cause had not been established, warning the DOJ and White House that the raid was illegal.

The FBI’s Washington Field Office “has been drafting a search warrant affidavit related to these potential boxes, but has some concerns that the information is single source, has not been corroborated, and may be dated,” an FBI official said in one email released by Grassley. “DOJ CES opines, however, that the SW’s meet the probable cause standard,” it said, using acronyms for the DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section and search warrant.

According to court papers unsealed by a judge in September 2022, the DOJ had submitted an affidavit to obtain the FBI search warrant of Mar-a-Lago. The documents had shown that Trump turned over Human Intelligence Control Systems and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) materials.

In those papers, an FBI agent whose name was withheld stated that they had “observed markings reflecting the following compliments/dissemination controls: HCS (Human Intelligence Control Systems), FISA, ORCON (originator controlled), NOFORN (not for release to foreign nationals), and SI (special intelligence)” earlier in 2022.

The classified materials case had started with a referral from the National Archives and Records Administration, which had said that it discovered classified documents when Trump sent records to the agency in January 2022.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also confirmed Tuesday that those emails will be provided to Congress by the DOJ, although he said he hasn’t personally reviewed those materials.

“It would verify and, I think, confirm much of what we understood,” Johnson said during a news conference.

“We spent a lot of time uncovering just the complete and total weaponization of the Department of Justice under the Biden administration. They used it to go after political enemies, and chief among them was, of course, Donald J. Trump.”

Johnson suggested that House Republicans were expecting as much.

“There’s going to have to be appropriate accountability. I mean, accountability is key. It’s important because if you’re going to restore the people’s faith in the justice system, you have to show them that there are serious consequences for people like Jack Smith who abuses that system,” he said, referring to the former special counsel who brought the classified documents case against Trump.

Smith has, on multiple occasions this year, defended his team’s work and indicated that the Biden administration did not interfere in that case or a separate one that was brought in Washington that accused Trump of trying to overturn the 2020 election results. Smith was named as special counsel in November 2022, months after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

In both cases, Trump pleaded not guilty and said the charges were part of a longstanding witch-hunt designed to harm his reelection chances.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to Smith to testify on Dec. 17 before the panel. Previously, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) suggested that Smith needs to testify because he is “ultimately responsible for the prosecutorial misconduct and constitutional abuses of your office.”

“It is equally important for me to make clear that nobody within the Department of Justice ever sought to interfere with, or improperly influence, my prosecutorial decision making,” Smith said in a Jan. 7 letter to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland. Claims that his “decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable,” Smith said.

 

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