The FBI search at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home

Gino Donatelli wrote:

Temple wrote:

Sorting through a litany of shifting justifications
for Trump's possession of those documents.

"I didn't take the documents, but if I did take the
documents, they weren't classified, and if they were
classified__then they were planted, and if they weren't,
I declassified them, and if I didn't, then it's a hoax."
"If it is not a hoax, Obama did it.'' __

He keeps changing, he keeps going through the lies.
You know, first, he said he was working and
cooperating with government agents, then, when we
found out the truth about that he didn't return all boxes
of files to the second subporiona and the he said the
agents planted it. Finally, he started lying saying he
declassified them."

"Then on Sunday, on the Sunday shows,
after all of these different stories didn't line up,
after all of the lies that he had thrown out there and
all of the you know what thrown against the wall
didn't line up, then he had former aides go on TV and
start a new round of lies."

"One saying, well, he was in a rush, he was packing,
he didn't know whether he was going to leave or not.
Then when he found out he was going to leave the White House --
I'm not sure why he didn't know that he was leaving the White House.

He lost by millions and millions of votes,
lost by what he called his own victory, lost by the same number,
which he said was one of the greatest landslides in
American history, the Electoral College count."

You watch way to much TV. You a cripple? Asking for my friend Jim.

Temple wrote:

I do not watch much TV..
I read-- It's obvious that I'm the only one that reads, actually..
Amazing you haven't grown and advanced yourself from
being a mischievous troll .. An aged old troll in 2022, is amazing indeed that they or one still exists and is still living in the 90's..
Bless your heart..

Just as I thought. Same old story same old words. You must read nothing but liberal talking points.
You couldn’t answer a question honestly because you’re most likely not an honest person.
Your titles are the works of a troll as well and I will assume as you have that you ain’t no spring chicken.

DOJ admits taking Trump's passports, offers to return them

In an acknowledgment the FBI over-collected evidence during the Mar-a-Lago raid, the Justice Department informed Donald Trump's team Monday that agents seized the former president's passports and are obligated to return them, Just the News has learned,

DOJ was making plans Monday evening to return the passports and have also alerted defense lawyers the FBI may have obtained materials covered by various privileges that will be returned in the next two weeks, two sources told Just the News.

DOJ has designated a process for separating materials that could be covered by executive privilege or attorney client privilege, the sources said.

The sources spoke only on condition of anonymity because the communications between the two sides are confidential.

The revelation came as Trump lawyers are discussing whether to go to court to demand a special legal officer be designated to review Trump evidence that was seized that was outside the scope of the warrant.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/doj-admits-it-took-trumps-passports-offers-return-them

Quote :

((( Now trump can go to Russia and have Putin give him asylum..
Or-
He can go to North Korea and read his love letter with Kim..)))

Why do you think Trump needs to go anywhere or needs to be granted asylum?
Your hatred of Trump doesn't negate his due process .. He hasn't been convicted of anything .. It's all speculation, media hype, hopes and prayers from you lefties that he will be ..

Quote :

According to the report, the National Archives found about 150 documents they concluded were sensitive when they sifted through the first batch of information gathered in Jan. 2022, "helping to explain the Justice Department’s urgent response."

"urgent response"

On info EIGHT AND A HALF MONTHS OLD????

< sheesh >

This is what, the 'We've Got Trump This Time For Sure' post number 36,265?

BREAKING: Judge Delivers Major Ruling on Unsealing Affidavit in Mar-a-Lago Raid
Carmine Sabia, August 25, 2022

The judge in the case deciding if the Department of Justice affidavit for a search of former President Donald Trump’s house has made a decision.

Mere hours after the Department of Justice submitted its redacted version of the affidavit the judge ordered it to be released with the redactions, CNN reported.

The document is to be given to media sources by noon on Friday.

The affidavit lays out why investigators believe there was probable cause that crimes had been committed. The warrant authorized the FBI to search former President Donald Trump’s home and private club earlier this month.

Earlier Thursday, the DOJ submitted its proposed redactions to US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who issued the order for the public release.

Justice Department Spokesman Anthony Coley said: “The United States has filed a submission under seal per the Court’s order of Aug. 22. The Justice Department respectfully declines further comment as the Court considers the matter.”

Justice Department prosecutors have emphasized that they need continued secrecy as to not disrupt the ongoing criminal investigation — especially as they keep confidential grand jury activity and protect witnesses who have or could share information.

In his order, Reinhart said the Justice Department convinced him that portions of the affidavit should remain sealed because “disclosure would reveal (1) the identities of witnesses, law enforcement agents, and uncharged parties, (2) the investigation’s strategy, direction, scope, sources, and methods, and (3) grand jury information.”

US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart says he will unseal some of the procedural filings currently under seal on the search warrant docket.

“I am not prepared to find that the affidavit should be fully sealed,” the judge said, meaning that, at minimum, some of the affidavit will be revealed.

“According to the judge’s comments, the filings are the Department of Justice’s motion to seal the warrant documents, the order granting that sealing request, and the criminal cover sheet,” CNN reported.

Jay Bratt, a Justice Department lawyer, argued that allowing the public to read the affidavit would “provide a roadmap to the investigation,” and would indicate the next steps in the probe.

“In this case, the court has found probable cause there’s a violation of one of the obstruction statutes, and that evidence of obstruction would be found at Mar-a-Lago” said Jay Bratt, who heads the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section.

The “public has a ‘clear and powerful’ interest in understanding the unprecedented investigation in former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of classified records,” the media organizations including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post said.

The Department of Justice argued that the affidavit should stay sealed.

“If disclosed, the affidavit would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps,” it said.

But the former president has called for it to be shown to everyone.

“In the interest of TRANSPARENCY, I call for the immediate release of the completely Unredacted Affidavit pertaining to this horrible and shocking BREAK-IN,” he said. “Also, the Judge on this case should recuse!”

The judge faced criticism and even threats after it was discovered that he had recused himself from a lawsuit involving Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Last week, one of the personal attorneys for former President Donald Trump demanded to know why the judge who signed the warrant to search his private house had recused himself from a lawsuit against 2016 Democrat Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton.

The attorney, Alina Habba, said that this judge recused himself from the former president’s lawsuit against Clinton this year when she spoke to Fox News host Jesse Watters on Friday, The Daily Mail reported.

“They needed a little drama, so they throw this out there. They go to the judge that had recused himself in my Hillary case a month ago,” she said.

“I would like to know why he recused himself in that case, but then he was able to sign this warrant. I want to know that,” she said.

oliver clotheshoffe wrote:

The Wise And Powerful wrote:

The judge in the case deciding if the Department of Justice affidavit for a search of former President Donald Trump’s house has made a decision.

What the hell kind of writing is that?

Probably was the caption under a pic which I didn't bother to post. My bad.

Feds Release Search Warrant Affidavit Used to Raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Home
Justin Rohrlich
Fri, August 26, 2022 at 10:29 AM

The Department of Justice on Friday released a redacted version of the sworn affidavit used to substantiate the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month for evidence of potential violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice, including the unlawful retention of classified documents prosecutors say weren’t supposed to be there.

Its much-heralded public unveiling follows an intense series of legal maneuvers by the ex-president, who has claimed he wants to see the affidavit made available for all to see, and the federal government, which wanted to keep it sealed so as not to jeopardize its ongoing investigation. A consortium of media organizations has also pushed for the affidavit’s release, citing public interest.

“I’m not prepared to find the affidavit should be fully sealed,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart—who originally signed off on the search warrant to begin with— said in court last week. “I believe based on my initial careful review of the affidavit many times, that there are portions that could preemptively be unsealed.”

On Thursday, Reinhart ordered the document unsealed by noon today.

Reinhart’s decision followed the submission by DOJ attorneys of proposed redactions to the affidavit, which the feds said were necessary to protect investigative methods and confidential sources. In the order, Reinhart said the suggested markup sufficiently shielded both.

“I find that the Government has met its burden of showing a compelling reason/good cause to seal portions of the Affidavit because disclosure would reveal (1) the identities of witnesses, law enforcement agents, and uncharged parties, (2) the investigation’s strategy, direction, scope, sources, and methods, and (3) grand jury information protected by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e),” he wrote. “I further find that the Government has met its burden of showing that its proposed redactions are narrowly tailored to serve the Government’s legitimate interest in the integrity of the ongoing investigation and are the least onerous alternative to sealing the entire Affidavit.”

On August 12, four days after the FBI searched Trump’s club, Attorney General Merrick Garland released the search warrant itself, along with a property receipt listing everything FBI agents carted away four days earlier from Trump’s Palm Beach club, where he now resides. The feds seized 20 boxes from various areas within the Mar-a-Lago compound, among them 11 sets of classified documents including one marked “various classified/TS/SCI,” for “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information.”

Such items are only allowed to be viewed in secure government facilities, which Trump’s resort is not. The FBI also clawed back binders of photos, Trump’s executive grant of clemency to convicted political operative Roger Stone, and information about French President Emmanuel Macron. Perhaps most disturbingly, Trump had a batch of “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons,” a source told The Washington Post.

Trump, who insists he is the victim of a political “witch hunt,” has offered evolving explanations for why he took classified material with him at the end of his term in the first place. At first, the former president suggested the FBI may have planted incriminating evidence in his home during the search. He then denied the Post report about nuclear documents, and dubbed the entire thing a “hoax.”

Next, Trump’s allies claimed he had always had a “standing order” to declassify anything and everything he removed from the White House. Trump then floated the notion that everything the FBI removed from Mar-a-Lago was protected by attorney-client privilege, going on to complain that agents “stole” his passports during the search.

Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, called his ex-boss’s claim of a standing declassification order “almost certainly a lie,” telling The New York Times that he had never heard of such a thing while serving in the administration.

“When somebody begins to concoct lies like this, it shows a real level of desperation,” he said.

“While Trump could have declassified whatever he liked while president, his apparent inability to produce any credible evidence that he actually did so is a genuine problem—particularly against the backdrop of an incumbent president who clearly sees the documents as still classified,” Scott Anderson, a former senior legal adviser at the State Department, told Roll Call.

The ongoing imbroglio between Trump and the feds follows almost a full year of delays by the ex-president to return the documents, which belong to the government. He returned some 700 pages of material in January to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), according to official correspondence released by the agency.

In April, when NARA officials became concerned that Trump was still withholding some of the materials they had requested, Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall told the former president’s legal team that there were “important national security interests in the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community getting access to these materials.”

At that point, Trump’s attorneys tried to buy additional time, saying they would not turn anything over to the FBI until Trump had decided if he wanted to claim executive privilege over the files.

But Steidel Wall dismissed the move outright, saying in a letter, “The question in this case is not a close one. 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.’”

When that didn’t work, the FBI got a search warrant, culminating in the search of the former president’s home for evidence of criminal activity—an unprecedented moment in American history.

Security measures at Mar-a-Lago are notoriously lax, and foreign nationals have long been able to get suspiciously close to Trump with apparent ease.

The document (38 pages):

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22267185-mal-affidavit

.

Retired FBI boss disassembles Trump search warrant: Feds ‘going to regret this’
Retired Assistant Director Kevin Brock says FBI didn't exhaust other means or appear to have established probable cause for search.
By John Solomon | justthenews.com
Updated: August 27, 2022 - 12:28am

The FBI's former intelligence chief declared Friday the agency should not have criminalized the records dispute between Donald Trump and the National Archives and that the bureau appears to have failed to meet the probable cause standard for the invasive search of the former president's Florida estate.

"I think they're going to regret this," retired Assistant Director Kevin Brock told the "Just the News, Not Noise" television show after reviewing a heavily redacted affidavit the FBI used to persuade a judge to allow the Aug. 8 search at Mar-a-Lago.

Brock, ordinarily an ardent defender of his former agency, has raised concerns for several days that the bureau did not exhaust other means to resolve the dispute over presidential and alleged classified records Trump kept. He said he did not believe the FBI adequately considered the possibility that Trump had wide latitude to declassify records and declare them personal.

He said Friday his concerns were only heightened by the court-ordered release of the search warrant affidavit, which he noted was still heavily redacted.

"I will caveat all of this by saying we can only see what we can see, but the first thing that jumped out to me is that the probable cause statement focuses on the nature of the documents, and where they are," said Brock, a respected three-decade agent who rose to become the bureau's first intelligence chief under Director Robert Mueller. "But it doesn't, at least in the unredacted portion, address the main element of the criminal federal statutes that they cite.

"The FBI should not have participated in this investigation. It is something that needs to be settled along established routes in that regard that we traditionally used. There was no need for law enforcement involvement in this. And there was certainly no need for an invasive search for the residence. I think they're going to regret this."

Brock defends the agency often but has also criticized — like many — the bureau's failures in the Trump-Russia collusion probe. And his assessment about the Trump search earlier this month is certain to carry weight with agents inside the bureau as well as retirees.

He said the threshold the FBI should have met under its own standards for a search warrant was to show Trump had records he was not authorized to keep and that were illegal to possess.

Brock noted the affidavit even acknowledged the president had the power to declassify and did not call the documents in dispute classified but rather documents with classified markings.

"From what I can see, that's not established in the probable cause," he said. "And there's an allusion to the argument from the Trump advocates that the former president has was within his authority to declassify and to establish what a presidential record is."

Brock said if the redacted sections of the affidavit don't lay out evidence that Trump's possession of the documents was clearly illegal, then "basically we have a search of the man's residence without cause being stated as to why something illegal happened."

Asked if he were still in the FBI whether he would have authorized the search warrant, Brock answered: "No, frankly not."

"And it's puzzling to a lot of folks who have been involved in search warrants for much more serious disputes, in white collar crimes where these things are settled in attorneys' offices, and you don't have to go in with an invasive search, contrary to the attorney general's statement during his press conference that they've exhausted all other means," he continued.

Brock said the FBI could have continued with negotiations, given that Trump's team had returned requested documents at least twice before, or asked a judge to enforce a grand jury subpoena previously issued in the case.

"This is not anything that rises, or passes the no smile test, that rises to the level where you would actually do a search with armed agents of almost any other federal employee, let alone the former president of the United States," he said.

Trump is teh bestest troll ever!

It's not looking too good for the FBI right now. They've been bad. Really bad.