A document filed on the docket in the court case related to last month’s FBI search at former President Donald Trump‘s Florida estate appears to have been submitted by a serial forger locked in a North Carolina federal prison complex, according to the Associated Press.
The document, which was filed on Monday and remains on the docket as of Friday afternoon, looked to be from the Treasury Department and said the agency had seized sensitive documents related to the Aug. 8 raid at Mar-a-Lago and included a warrant ordering CNN to “preserve leaked tax records.” However, a review of dozens of court records and interviews by the Associated Press suggests the document is entirely fake and may have originated from someone with a history of filing other phony court documents.
Marked as a “MOTION to Intervene by U.S. Department of the Treasury,” the document is riddled with spelling and syntax mistakes, stating, “The U.S. Department of Treasury through the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Marshals Service have arrested Seized Federal Securities containing sensitive documents which are subject to the Defendant Sealed Search Warrant by the F.B.I. arrest.”
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A federal statute for collecting financial records in investigations was cited in the document and also included two supposed warrants, one to a towing company in Michigan and another claiming to be sent to CNN in Atlanta, according to a copy of the allegedly bogus filing obtained by the Washington Examiner.
But the supposed warrants were reportedly identical to paperwork filed in a separate case in Georgia federal court brought by an inmate located at the prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina. That case was tossed out, along with other similar bogus lawsuits the man filed from his prison cell.
In the Georgia case, the man claimed Trump and others had “acquired ‘millions of un-redacted classified tax returns and other sensitive financial data, bank records and accounts of banking and tax transactions of several million’ Americans and federal government agencies,” according to court documents obtained by the outlet. The judge presiding over the case called his suit “delusional” and said it would be impossible to “discern any cognizable claim” from the filings.
The man, whom the Associated Press did not identify by name due to a documented history of mental illness and lack of a criminal charge related to the filing, has a history of impersonating federal officers in court records, and his mail is supposed to be subject to additional scrutiny from the Bureau of Prisons, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The inmate has been in prison for several years since he was found not competent to stand trial after an arrest for placing a fake explosive outside the Guardian Building, a Detroit skyscraper.
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It is not immediately clear how the fake motion and warrants arrived at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, though it raises concerns about the vetting of documents filed on the court’s docket, as a stamp noting the Georgia case number was placed on the phony warrants.
The Washington Examiner contacted the Justice Department and the Treasury Department for comment.
