The release comes as former special counsel Jack Smith is set to testify before the House on Wednesday.
FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed Tuesday that FBI officials flagged probable cause concerns with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the weeks leading up to the FBI raid targeting President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property to recover classified documents in 2022.
In response to a reporter’s statement on X that the FBI didn’t believe it had probable cause to search Trump’s Florida property, Patel responded: “It’s true.”
“We just turned over documents to Capitol Hill to be made public showing the FBI told DOJ they did not have probable cause for raiding President Trump’s home in Mar A Lago but DOJ ‘didn’t give a damn’ and did it anyway,” he added in his post.
Emails released Tuesday by the office of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and reviewed by The Epoch Times showed communications between the DOJ and FBI in the weeks before the search of the then-former president’s property. FBI officials, whose names were redacted, at the time had concerns about not having probable cause to search the property before the August 2022 raid. Trump was later charged in the case with retaining classified documents after leaving office.
The FBI’s Washington Field Office “has been drafting a search warrant affidavit related to these potential boxes, but has some concerns that the information is single source, has not been corroborated, and may be dated,” an FBI official said in one email released by Grassley. “DOJ CES opines, however, that the SW’s meet the probable cause standard,” it said, using acronyms for the DOJ’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section and search warrant.
According to court papers unsealed by a judge in September 2022, the DOJ had submitted an affidavit to obtain the FBI search warrant of Mar-a-Lago. The documents had shown that Trump turned over Human Intelligence Control Systems and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) materials.
In those papers, an FBI agent whose name was withheld stated that they had “observed markings reflecting the following compliments/dissemination controls: HCS (Human Intelligence Control Systems), FISA, ORCON (originator controlled), NOFORN (not for release to foreign nationals), and SI (special intelligence)” earlier in 2022.
The classified materials case had started with a referral from the National Archives and Records Administration, which had said that it discovered classified documents when Trump sent records to the agency in January 2022.
