How the Biden Admin ran over FBI to get Trump

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The public unveiling of the Biden administration’s lawfare campaign against a past president and political rival came on Aug. 8, 2022, the day the FBI descended on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in search of classified documents. It was a shocking moment, the first time in history federal law-enforcement had acted against a former president. More shocking: It didn’t have to be that way. The Justice Department insisted on it.

That’s the disturbing information contained in emails released this week by the Senate Judiciary Committee. In missives spanning the summer of 2022, FBI officials expressed alarm and forcefully pushed back against a DOJ-driven search warrant and raid. The FBI highlighted legal and evidentiary weaknesses, noted offers of cooperation, proposed numerous better avenues. The DOJ ignored or overruled it all, drooling over a prosecution.

A June 1 FBI Washington field office summary shows, for starters, that the department appears to have sucker-punched the Trump team. It had contacted a Trump attorney “requesting the return of any classified documents” by May 24. When that deadline passed, it immediately moved to a search warrant.

Yet “one complicating factor,” the summary explains, was that the attorney had written back to the department on May 25, “claiming that the DOJ had told him the return date was flexible” and that only on deadline day itself had the department “notified him that the return date was not going to be extended.” The Trump lawyer had meanwhile suggested they “try to reach an accommodation.”

“In light of this,” the FBI asked the DOJ to take the “reasonable” route, “to negotiate the return of any classified documents.” The memo reports the department’s response: It was “adamant that no accommodation would be given and that they would not reach out to the attorney.”

The FBI’s other giant concern? It didn’t think the government even had grounds for a search warrant. The summary explains that “very little has been developed related to who might be culpable for mishandling documents.” It thought there might be boxes at Mar-a-Lago but had “concerns that the information is single source, has not been corroborated, and may be dated.” Yet the DOJ “opines . . . that the [warrants] meet the probable cause standard.”

One FBI individual in a mid-July email expresses frustration that we “haven’t generated any new facts,” but the DOJ churns out “draft after draft after draft” of a warrant. “Absent a witness coming forward with recent information about classified on site, at what point is it fair to table this?” An FBI email from July 20 from the special agent in charge circulates this frustration, again rejecting that “we have established probable cause for the search warrant,” even as DOJ pushed to widen its scope. It states: “If a primary goal of this investigation is to identify and recover classified records quickly, so as to protect the information, the 6 weeks spent fixated on probable cause for a search warrant have been counterproductive.”

It then proposes, in detail, three “alternative, less intrusive and likelier, quicker, options for resolution.” The first, obvious one was to get in touch with Mr. Trump’s attorney to “inquire about any further documents” and get his assistance. This made eminent sense, the FBI email explains, because the attorney had already complied with a Justice Department demand to padlock a storage-room door, when he had also been told by the DOJ to await “further instructions.” This provided a “logical and most expedient opportunity” to get more info on what documents existed and pave the way for a consent search. (Exactly the route the government pursued when checking to see if Mr. Biden or Mike Pence ended up with classified material in their homes.)

Another option was simply to get in touch with Mr. Trump himself, since the former president had said in June that “he would be willing to assist and cooperate.” Or the government could ask the National Archives to pursue the return of all “presidential records,” which would encompass classified documents. The Justice Department refused to consider these routes, any one of which could have avoided a raid and criminal case.

Which is exactly why they refused. The DOJ wanted this. An Aug. 4 email from the special agent all but says this. The agent requests the FBI be allowed to be the “first contact” in the raid, to “set the tone for the day,” since it should be “professional” and “low key,” in hopes that cooperation still “could go some way to resolving” the broader classified docs dispute. Yet he notes that DOJ attorney Jay Bratt “already has built an antagonistic relationship” with the Trump team, and that DOJ attorney Donald Toscas had said on a call the day before that “he frankly doesn’t give a damn about the optics.” A DOJ first contact, he explains, “will not go well.”

None of it went well. For Mr. Trump, for the Justice Department, for the FBI—for the country. How many months and dollars wasted on a prosecution that failed, how much DOJ reputation squandered—for an issue that could have been solved with a phone call? Ask the Biden team for the reckoning.

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