The Illegal FBI Raid on Mar-a-Largo By Chris Knight (Florida)

Here is some more material dealing with the illegality of the FBI raid upon Trump’s Mar-a-Largo mansion. We have legal experts detailing how the raid violated the Fourth Amendment which governs research warrants to precisely prevent what happened, happening. For this article, one point not yet made elsewhere at the blog is the Trump staff left the security cameras on, after being told to turn them off by the FBI. Imagine, the spooks never even checked that the cameras were off! If Trump is right that the reason staff were kicked out (which was not in the search warrant by the way), was so that evidence of some false crime could be planted, then the tale of the camera will win the day. I will be laughing if something like this turns up. Trump could even bluff further with it, saying, we have got them planting evidence, then bagging it. I am not lawyer, but it seems that the sloppy procedures have destroyed the legal use of anything found, anyway.

https://conservativebrief.com/eric-trump-2-65428/

“Eric Trump said that the security cameras at Mar-a-Lago captured FBI agents “behaving improperly” during the raid on former Presiden Donald Trump’s home on Monday.

The former president’s son alleged that agents were accessing parts of Donald Trump’s Florida residence that they “shouldn’t have been.”

In an interview with DailyMail.com, Eric Trump said staff refused to turn off the surveillance cameras at the request of the FBI and that they captured agents raiding areas that they weren’t authorized to.

“There are 30 agents there,” he recalled. “They told our lawyer…’You have to leave the property right now. Turn off all security cameras.'”

Earlier this week, Eric Trump said the FBI agents broke into Donald Trump’s personal safe at Mar-a-Lago but that it was empty.

He told Fox News Channel‘s Brian Kilmeade that the safe was “empty” and that over two dozen FBI agents were involved in the raid.

He said the raid was to find documents that should have gone to the National Archives. It’s unknown if they retrieved the documents, but Eric Trump said there was nothing in the safe that the agents searched.

“Nothing was in the safe,” Kilmeade said, quoting Eric Trump.

The FBI’s unannounced raid was allegedly tied to boxes of classified information that Trump had supposedly taken to his Florida estate.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Biden Justice Department to produce a copy of a search warrant executed at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where the FBI conducted a nine-hour-plus search on Monday.

Federal Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered the DOJ to “file a Response to the Motion to Unseal” the warrant after requests were made by the Times-Union, a newspaper located in Albany, N.Y., as well as the conservative legal group Judicial Watch.

The judge said that the DOJ must respond no later than Aug. 15, reports said.

Reinhart signed off on the FBI’s warrant to search the former president’s palatial home in South Florida in what he said was an “unannounced raid on my home.”

He took a leave of absence from a local U.S. Attorney’s office more than 10 years ago to represent employees of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein after they had gotten immunity during the lengthy probe of the now-late financier for sex trafficking.

Republicans are vowing to “clean house” in the wake of the FBI raiding Trump’s home in Florida.

“This is Gestapo crap and it will not stand. The Department of Injustice needs to be cleaned out if they are going to start pretending we are some kind of banana republic,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, Colorado Republican, went on to say in a video she posted on Twitter.

Arizona GOP Rep. Paul Gosar issued a similar response, saying: “I will support a complete dismantling and elimination of the democrat brown shirts known as the FBI. This is too much for our republic to withstand.”

“DEFUND THE FBI!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a member of the GOP from Georgia, stated in a post on Twitter.

“House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Attorney General Merrick Garland should preserve documents and clear his calendar because the GOP will investigate the raid if they retake the majority. Ms. Boebert made a similar vow in her Twitter video,” the report said.

“The FBI raiding Donald Trump is unprecedented. It is corrupt & an abuse of power,” Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz wrote on Twitter. “What Nixon tried to do, Biden has now implemented: The Biden Admin has fully weaponized DOJ & FBI to target their political enemies.”

https://townhall.com/columnists/jonathanemord/2022/08/09/the-illegal-search-of-maralago-n2611487

“The FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago was an abuse of prosecutorial discretion and a violation of the Fourth Amendment. It reveals political bias. Under the Fourth Amendment, a search warrant may only be issued from a court upon the establishment of “probable cause.” Under his Article II powers as Commander-in-Chief, the former president while still in office possessed the inherent power to determine whether any document would be deemed classified or not. In light of that inherent power and his executive privilege, a cause of action alleged against him based on his movement of documents, including those said to be classified, could not pass the “probable cause” test. Accordingly, no attorney for the Department of Justice should have sought, and no federal court should have issued, an ex parte (without advance notice to the opponent and an opportunity to be heard) warrant to search for documents at the Mar-a-Lago residence of the former president.

Under the Fourth Amendment, “probable cause” must be established based on “oath or affirmation” as to the truth of the matters supporting an allegation of criminality. The things to be searched and seized, their location and nature, must be described with particularity. Probable cause is a “reasonable belief” that a crime has occurred or is about to occur. The establishment of probable cause depends on witness statements, affidavits, and evidence. Mere suspicion or belief is not enough to establish probable cause. Things seized based on an erroneous assertion of probable cause are not lawful for use as evidence at trial but are prohibited from serving as proof under the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine. In this instance, reports suggests that FBI agents performed a roving search in which they seized all manner of documents, thus belying the notion of a targeted search consistent with the Fourth Amendment.

Under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, the president is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States. In that position, he is the final authority over national security classification. Indeed, the system for classifying documents to avoid public disclosure of their contents is by Executive Order. The authority exercised by the Archivist of the National Archives and Records Administration over those documents is pursuant to orders of the president of the United States. As Commander-in-Chief, the president may declare any document classified or not within his sound discretion. He may not be questioned for that official act by any other federal agent, officer, branch, department, or agency. This power was recognized by the Supreme Court in Navy v. Eagan, 484 U.S. 518 (1988). There, the Supreme Court ruled the “president’s authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security . . . flows primarily from [the] constitutional investment of power in the president and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”

In light of that plenary presidential power to deem any document classified, it is highly dubious that former President Trump’s removal of documents from the White House to his private residence involved any illegality. Indeed, because the then sitting president had the inherent power to classify and declassify any document he so chose, the notion that he moved classified information improperly is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to maintain. That he moved other documents that the Archivist thinks should be possessed by the National Archives and Records Administration involves issues of executive privilege and begs ultimate questions as to when, if ever, the Archivist may second-guess a privilege determination by the president over his papers. Whether there has been a violation of the Presidential Records Act is properly a civil law determination for which a remedy would involve a civil order to produce documents, not criminal prosecution (in order to avoid allowing the legislative or judicial branches to trench on the inherent powers of the President over the operations of the executive branch).  In any event, those kinds of determinations are best decided outside of a court through continued negotiation with the former President or, if not, then in a court following a full-blown trial on the merits of the matter, affording no precipitous power in the government to seize the documents in question.

To determine issues related to possession of any particular document, at a minimum both sides need to be heard by the court. The issuance of an ex parte search and seizure warrant in this instance was an abuse of discretion and a violation of President Trump’s Fourth Amendment rights. Proceeding on such a flimsy basis in violation of the Fourth Amendment is further evidence of bias by Attorney General Merrick Garland. That bias precedes the raid and is evidenced by multiple instances, such as the failure of the Attorney General to bring charges against Hunter Biden for well-documented instances of influence peddling and illicit drug possession and use or to appoint a special counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause while serving as vice president of the United States or to prosecute BLM and Antifa rioters who committed acts of arson, assault, battery, and murder while prosecuting many January 6 protestors on the flimsiest of grounds. That bias, not President Trump’s possession of certain documents, is the real threat to the rule of law. The full extent to which the Attorney General has allowed bias to affect his exercise of discretion ought to be the subject of congressional investigation and, upon proof of inaction in the face of criminality, and selective prosecution in furtherance of political bias, ought to be the basis for articles of impeachment.”