Former President Donald Trump can likely raise legitimate legal challenges to the FBI’s search of his Florida resort following revelations that his passports and privileged documents were seized during the raid, a former FBI assistant director said.
“Trump’s attorneys could have a runway to argue the scope of the search is overly broad,” former FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence Kevin Brock told Just the News. “Search warrants normally require a level of specificity that seems to be missing in this warrant. Specificity is important in order to protect 4th Amendment rights from exuberant government overreach designed to find whatever they can.”
The FBI returned three passports belonging to Trump that were seized during the raid on Tuesday, and Fox News reported on Saturday that at least five of the boxes the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago contained information protected by attorney-client privilege.
TRUMP BEING INVESTIGATED FOR ESPIONAGE ACT VIOLATION, UNSEALED FBI WARRANT SHOWS
Some conservative critics have blasted the FBI’s raid for being overly broad, noting that the bureau’s court-approved warrant authorized agents to seize from Trump’s resort “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021.”
“This apparently makes a novel legal assertion that any presidential record kept by a former president is against the law,” Brock said. “You have to wonder what the other living former presidents think about that. They have the right and, apparently, clear desire to remain silent.”
Trump demanded the FBI return his passports and privileged documents in a post on Truth Social on Monday.
“It has just been learned that the FBI, in its now famous raid of Mar-a-Lago, took boxes of privileged ‘attorney-client’ material, and also ‘executive’ privileged material, which they knowingly should not have taken,” Trump wrote. “By copy of this TRUTH, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken.”
The FBI said in a statement Tuesday that it “follows search and seizure procedures ordered by courts, then returns items that we do not need to be retained for law enforcement sources.”
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It was reported that the FBI interviewed Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin, two top White House lawyers under Trump, in connection to sensitive documents that were kept at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence after he left office, according to reports.
Philbin, the former deputy counsel to the president, was interviewed by the agency sometime in the spring after the National Archives retrieved about 15 boxes of material from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence earlier this year, sources familiar with the situation told the New York Times. The National Archives contends those documents were presidential records that should have been given to the agency when Trump left office.
