You can say this much about the law enforcement search at former President Trump’s home in Florida: The Justice Department and the FBI had better have a very good reason for seeking and executing this warrant.
Republicans have seized on the search warrant, perhaps the first ever applied against a former president, as more evidence that the Justice Department unfairly bases its decisions on politics.
Though little has been publicly confirmed, The Washington Post reported that the basis for the search warrant appears to be related to concerns by the National Archives that Trump, or his lawyers and aides, had not returned all the documents and other material, some of it classified, that were considered government property covered by the Presidential Records Act.
As usual, the feds are providing no details. A lawyer for Trump said his attorneys had discussions with the Justice Department about items brought to Florida when Trump left office. The attorneys looked through two dozen or more boxes of documents and turned over several items. They also put a lock on the storage facility to keep its contents better secured.
It’s impossible to say whether a warrant was required to resolve this issue until more information about any classified material is made public. You would think the people at the National Archives could have figured out how to resolve this more amicably.
But the greatest irony is that if Trump is found to have possession of anything classified, it could be a felony punishable by a fine and up to five years in prison. That’s unlikely to be pursued in this case, but it is still fascinating.
The president who signed that bill? Donald Trump in 2018, partly as a reaction to the classified emails that Hillary Clinton had allowed onto a private server when she was secretary of state.
