On the day before the FBI obtained a search warrant to look for classified material at former President Donald Trump’s private club and home in Florida nearly two years ago, one of the agents on the case sent a reassuring email to his bosses.
“It is the FBI’s intention that the execution of the warrant be handled in a professional, calm manner,” he wrote, “and that the optics of the search are taken into account.”
And that’s more or less what happened when 30 agents and two federal prosecutors entered the grounds of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach estate, at 8:59 a.m. on August 8, 2022. Over the next ten hours, the court heard, there was little drama as they carted away a trove of boxes containing highly sensitive state secrets in three vans and a rented Ryder box truck.
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Two years later, Trump has attempted to completely turn the facts about that search on their head, most notably by distorting the meaning of standard instructions to officers about the limits on their use of deadly force.
Although the court-authorized arrest warrant was executed while he was more than 1,000 miles away in the New York area, the former president has repeatedly in recent weeks promoted the blatantly false story that the officers had shown up that day and were willing to take him to kill, when the instructions actually established strict conditions designed to minimize any use of lethal force.
“It has just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their HORRIBLE raid on Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote in a fundraising email last month.
“Joe Biden was locked and loaded, ready to take me out and endanger my family,” the email said.
Trump’s baseless statements about the search are among the clearest examples of the ways he has attempted to gain political advantage by attacking the criminal justice system and the rule of law itself.
They also reflect his escalating use of inflammatory language during the campaign. In recent months, Trump has accused President Joe Biden and his administration of weaponizing the justice system to undermine his campaign, but now claims Democrats are bent on putting him in jail. Now he portrays himself as a political martyr whose life could be in danger.
In addition to playing into his strategy of portraying himself as a victim of a deep state conspiracy, Trump’s distorted version of the Mar-a-Lago search has also sparked a new legal battle between his lawyers and prosecutors in the special counsel’s office . , Jac Smith. Smith’s team has accused Trump of illegally removing dozens of classified documents from the White House after he left office and obstructing the administration’s repeated efforts to recover them.
Outraged by Trump’s comments, Smith’s deputies late last month asked Aileen M. Cannon, the judge overseeing the prosecution over the documents, to revise Trump’s release conditions and include a measure banning him from making public statements that could endanger officers working on the case. Prosecutors want to ensure that the former president does nothing further to threaten or intimidate the officers and have asked Cannon to risk his freedom.
The heated fight marks the first time in the documents case that Smith has tried to limit comments from Trump, who has already faced silence orders in two of his other criminal cases. The dispute will require Cannon to undertake a balancing act between protecting the agents from potential harm and protecting Trump’s right to free speech to criticize the FBI, even with blatant lies.
Trump’s lawyers appear eager to get involved in the fight, if only because it could easily cause additional delays, even as it provides the former president with powerful political talking points. The proceedings have already been seriously delayed by a morass of legal battles, often over secondary issues, and a trial on the charges looks increasingly unlikely before Election Day.
The former president’s lawyers have challenged the administration’s request to limit Trump’s comments as an “unprecedented and unconstitutional application of censorship.” And they have gone after Smith and his aides in an extremely personal manner, labeling them the “Thought Police” and asking the judge to punish them.
The conflict began just over two weeks ago when Cannon, who sits in U.S. District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida, unpacked a motion by Trump’s lawyers to suppress evidence the FBI collected during its search for Mar-a -Lago. Attached to the motion were dozens of pages of underlying investigative documents that provided new details about how the search was planned and executed.
The documents showed that the agency had gone to great lengths to ensure that the first search of a former president’s home in American history did not turn into a danger or a spectacle.
For example, they showed how the FBI chose to conduct the search on a day when Trump was not at his estate and how agents alerted one of his lawyers room by room almost an hour before they began searching the property. Members of the search team arrived in unmarked “business casual” attire instead of their usual attire with the agency’s well-known logo.
The agents had a plan in place to deal with the media if reporters got wind of the event, and they planned to rely on “existing liaison relationships” with the Secret Service if for some reason Trump’s protective details would decide to intervene.
One of the unsealed documents was an internal operations warrant, which contained boilerplate language restricting the use of deadly force during the search. In this case, the order said, deadly force could only be used if there was “imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury” to the officers themselves or to others on the ground that day.
But even though most of the FBI’s searches use the same stock phrases, Trump has capitalized on them and twisted them. In a social media post posted the same day the warrant was unsealed, he falsely accused Biden of “authorizing the FBI to use lethal (deadly) force” during the search.
Within days of Trump making these false claims, prominent right-wing figures — including Steve Bannon, the former president’s former political adviser — repeated them and, in some cases, blew them even further out of proportion.
“Predictably and as he certainly intended,” prosecutors wrote to Cannon, “others have amplified Trump’s misleading statements, falsely characterizing the inclusion of the entirely standard use of force policy as an attempt to ‘assassinate’ Trump .”
The mischaracterizations drew the ire of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who rarely intervenes in the cases filed by Smith, who as a special prosecutor is independent of the Justice Department on a day-to-day basis. But on Tuesday, the normally soft-spoken Garland flatly contradicted Trump during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, saying the former president’s claims were based on a distortion of standard Justice Department policy on the use of force.
“This is dangerous,” Garland said. “It increases the threat of violence against prosecutors and career police officers.”
Garland noted that the same policy was in place when FBI agents searched Biden’s Delaware home for classified documents.
Smith’s deputies have not yet pointed out any current threats inspired by the lies. But in their filing with Cannon, they noted there were serious consequences after the former president took to social media two years ago to frame the Mar-a-Lago search as a personal attack against him.
Three days later, a gunman in Ohio tried to shoot his way into an FBI field office near Cincinnati. The man, Ricky W. Shiffer, had said at the time that “patriots” should go to Florida to defend Trump and kill FBI agents. Shiffer was subsequently killed during a shootout with local police.
It remains unclear how Cannon will rule on Smith’s request. In a provocative preliminary decision last week, she temporarily rejected the move on procedural grounds.
Smith then resubmitted his request to her after going through the necessary procedural steps. He reiterated his claim that Trump had lied and that “the FBI took extraordinary care to execute the search warrant discreetly and without unnecessary confrontation.”
That’s certainly how agency officials felt at the time of the operation.
Among the recently released documents was an email from an unnamed FBI official to the various teams that participated in the search, a day after it took place.
“I just wanted to reiterate my thanks for everyone’s help yesterday,” it said. “We couldn’t have asked for anything more. Well done to all of you and your teams.”
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