This week, the FBI raided the Florida home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. They based their raid on the purported rationale that they suspected Trump of having mishandled classified information, taking home materials meant for the National Archives: according to The New York Times, the search “appeared to be focused on material that Mr. Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago…Those boxes contained many pages of classified documents.” Trump quickly responded with outrage: “After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate. Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. They even broke into my safe!”
We have not yet seen the warrant for the raid, the warrant application, or the underlying evidence; presumably, the head of the FBI and the head of the DOJ, Attorney General Merrick Garland, would have had to sign off on the raid. And, to put it mildly, the basis for such a raid – a raid authorized by a current presidential administration on the leader of the prior administration and frontrunner for the nomination in 2024 – seems extraordinarily weak. In 2015, former Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger only received a misdemeanor charge for stuffing classified documents down his pants; in 2016, the FBI investigated Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified emails but certainly never raided her home or offices, despite finding that it was “possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account,” complete with access to classified information. President Trump, by contrast, was president – which means he had plenary authority to declassify any document. Yet it was Trump who was raided.
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