The FBI agents who raided former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort were looking for certain records, according to a lawyer for Trump who was on the scene while agents were at the resort.
“They’re looking for presidential records, what they deemed to be presidential records, and anything that could potentially be classified,” Christina Bobb, the lawyer, told The Epoch Times on Aug. 9.
“We had been very cooperative with them before. And it’s unclear to me why they went to such drastic measures to do this. But they did. And as far as the probable cause goes, they wouldn’t give that to us,” she added.
In mid-January, the National Archives and Records Administration arranged for the transport from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives 15 boxes that the archives said contained presidential records. Under the Presidential Records Act, the records should have been transferred in January 2021 as Trump left office, the institution said in a statement at the time. The administration did not return an inquiry on Tuesday.
Approximately two dozen FBI agents arrived around 9 a.m. on Monday morning and remained at Mar-a-Lago, which is in West Palm Beach, for about 10 hours.
Agents initially resisted showing Bobb the warrant but ultimately did. But the agents would not allow any representatives of the former president to oversee the search, Bobb said. The justification for the search also remains under seal. Trump’s legal team plans on asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to unseal the search warrant affidavit, which would outline why authorities asked for the warrant.
“We don’t know what the probable cause is. I don’t think there is a good cause to do such a drastic thing. But they did,” Bobb said.
The FBI has declined to comment. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have not returned requests for comment. The White House has said the is independent and that President Joe Biden and others in the White House were not notified of the raid ahead of time.
By Zachary Stieber and Roman Balmakov
