White House files scrutinized in search
GOP and Trump supporters in an uproar over action
The FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida on Monday continued to rock Washington and, more broadly, American politics, amid a swirl of questions about what led the Justice Department to take such a stunning step.
The search came after a visit this spring to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla, by federal agents — including a Justice Department counterintelligence official — to discuss materials Trump had improperly taken with him when he left the White House.
Trump was briefly present for that visit, as was at least one of his attorneys, according to people familiar with the situation.
Those materials contained many pages of classified documents, according to a person familiar with their contents. By law, presidential materials must be preserved and sent to the National Archives when a president leaves office. It remained unclear what specific materials agents might have been seeking Monday or why the Justice Department and the FBI decided to go ahead with the search now.
Trump had delayed returning 15 boxes of material requested by officials with the National Archives for many months, doing so only in January when the threat of action to retrieve them grew. The case was referred to the Justice Department by the archives early this year.
In carrying out the search, federal agents broke open a safe, Trump said.
The search was the latest remarkable turn in the long-running investigations into Trump’s actions before, during and after his presidency — and even as he weighs announcing another candidacy for the White House.
It came as the Justice Department has stepped up its separate inquiry into Trump’s efforts to remain in office after his defeat in the 2020 election and as the former president also faces an accelerating criminal inquiry in Georgia and civil actions in New York.
Trump has long cast the FBI as a tool of Democrats who have been out to get him. The search set off a furious reaction among his supporters in the Republican Party and on the far right.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, the Republican leader in the House, suggested that he intended to investigate Attorney General Merrick B. Garland if Republicans took control of the chamber in November. A delegation of House Republicans was scheduled to travel to Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., for a dinner with him Tuesday.
Aggressive language was pervasive on the right as Monday night turned into Tuesday morning.
“This. Means. War,” the Gateway Pundit, a proTrump outlet, wrote in an online post that was quickly amplified by a Telegram account connected to Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime political adviser.
The FBI would have needed to convince a judge that it had probable cause that a crime had been committed, and that agents might find evidence at Mar-a-Lago, to get a search warrant. Proceeding with a search on a former president’s home would almost surely have required signoff from top officials at the bureau and the Justice Department.
The search, however, does not mean prosecutors have determined that Trump committed a crime.
Despite the historic and politically incendiary nature of the search, neither the FBI nor the Justice Department has publicly commented or explained the basis for its action.
Trump was in the New York area at the time of the search.
In another development. U.S. Rep. Scott Perry said his cellphone was seized Tuesday morning by FBI agents carrying a search warrant.
The circumstances surrounding the seizure were not immediately known. Perry, though, has been a figure in the congressional investigation into President Donald Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
Former senior Justice Department officials have testified that Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, had “an important role” in Trump’s effort to try to install Jeffrey Clark — a top Justice official who was pushing Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud — as the acting attorney general.
In a statement Tuesday, Perry said three agents visited him while he was traveling Tuesday with his family and “seized my cell phone.” He called the action “banana republic tactics.”
“They made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would have made arrangements for them to have my phone if that was their wish,” Perry said. “I’m outraged — though not surprised — that the FBI under the direction of Merrick Garland’s DOJ, would seize the phone of a sitting Member of Congress.”