Documents Reveal That, for AG Garland, Probable Cause for Mar-a-Lago Raid was Optional
“As everyone is tracking, WFO does not believe (and has articulated to DOJ CES), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar-a-Lago.”
Following the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy. Then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the nomination, arguing that the Senate should not consider a Supreme Court nominee during a presidential election year. He maintained that the decision should be left to the next president, allowing “the American people to decide.”
Perhaps the only saving grace of Garland’s tenure as attorney general is that it made unmistakably clear how dangerous a lifetime appointment to the Court would have been. Thank you, Sen. McConnell.
Although Obama and his “wingman” Attorney General Eric Holder began the process of weaponizing the Justice Department, Garland will be most remembered for finishing the job, leaving Americans’ trust in a once-revered institution in tatters.
One of Garland’s most egregious decisions was his personal approval of the warrant request for the FBI’s infamous raid on then-former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022.
Several days after the raid, Garland made a brief statement to reporters in defense of his decision. He said, “The search warrant was authorized by a federal court upon the required finding of probable cause.”
He admitted he had “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter” and claimed “the department does not take such a decision lightly.”
What followed was one of the most brazenly insincere and dishonest defenses of bad behavior ever delivered by a public servant [Emphasis added.]:
Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy. Upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favor. Under my watch, that is precisely what the Justice Department is doing.
All Americans are entitled to the even handed application of the law, to due process of the law, and to the presumption of innocence. Much of our work is by necessity conducted out of the public eye. We do that to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans and to protect the integrity of our investigations.
On Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed he had received “shocking” new documents from the DOJ and the FBI “showing [the] FBI DID NOT BELIEVE IT HAD PROBABLE CAUSE to raid Pres Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home but Biden DOJ pushed for it anyway. Based on the records Mar-a-Lago raid was a miscarriage of justice.”
Received shocking new docs 2day from DOJ & FBI showing FBI DID NOT BELIEVE IT HAD PROBABLE CAUSE to raid Pres Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home but Biden DOJ pushed for it anyway
Based on the records Mar-a-Lago raid was a miscarriage of justice
Read for urself: https://t.co/qbJNT0tcRE pic.twitter.com/ljWdjndhHE
— Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) December 16, 2025
The documents can be viewed in full here. And indeed, they show that the FBI struggled to find probable cause for the raid.
While most email senders and recipients are redacted, the documents nonetheless reveal that the FBI was searching for a plausible pretext to search the residence. In one email, an FBI official expressed his preference to wait until Trump had left the property for the season before carrying out the raid.
With Trump’s team having returned “a trove” of documents on June 3, 2022, and witness interviews providing no clarity on whether any specific documents remained outstanding, agents expressed frustration over how to establish probable cause for a search.
In a July 13, 2022, email, an agent asked, “What is the guidance for continuing to work on this document without any new information?”
An hour later, an agent from the FBI’s Washington Field Office wrote, “We haven’t generated any new facts, but keep being given draft after draft after draft. Absent a witness coming forward with recent information about classified on site, at what point is it fair to table this?”
Another agent recounted six “counterproductive” weeks spent trying to justify a search warrant, before the DOJ stepped in and overruled them, as one top official bluntly remarked that he “frankly [didn’t] give a damn about the optics.”
A July 20 memo from a redacted sender at the FBI’s Washington Field Office began, “As everyone is tracking, WFO does not believe (and has articulated to DOJ CES), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar-a-Lago. DOJ has opined that they do have probable cause, requesting a wide scope including residence, office, storage space. …”
Throughout July 2022, versions of a search warrant were frantically drafted and sent back and forth between FBI and DOJ officials.
On August 1, one week before the raid, an email from Anthony Riedlinger, special agent in charge of counterintelligence at the Washington field office, told George Toscas, the deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s National Security Division, “WFO would like to propose a second path.”
It appears that Riedlinger was overruled by DOJ officials. Despite his objections and those of other FBI officials, Garland signed off on the search warrant just three day later.
According to the emails, the FBI wanted the search warrant to be executed “in a professional, low key manner … mindful of the optics of the search.”
As we know, the raid was a spectacle.
Former special counsel Jack Smith used material gleaned from the search as the basis of his classified document case against Trump, a sham case that was mercifully dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Aileen Cannon.
Smith will testify under oath before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. It will be fun to watch him squirm.
But the committee ultimately needs to hear directly from Garland himself. In light of Grassley’s revelations, a subpoena now appears not only justified, but necessary — and there is little doubt it will be forthcoming.
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. https://t.co/qIlShYTd5V
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) December 16, 2025
Wow.
FBI to give Congress bombshell memos warning Biden DOJ didn’t have probable cause to raid Trump home | Just The News https://t.co/0t0fOjov1X
— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) December 16, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
Tell me something I didn’t know already.
Better yet, tell me something that’s sending somebody to prison.
After the doors have slammed. After.
Prison?
Never heard of it?
Perp walk this loathsome SOB. Raid his house before sunrise and let Roger Stone film it.
This just proves what we already knew about the Mar-a-Lago raid. Nothing is going to happen. Smith will squirm and not lose his law license. Garland will obfuscate and walk away. Grassley would do a better service by approving the President’s AG nominees for the States. Until he gets rid of the “blue slip” crap he’s just another part of the UniParty thwarting the duly elected President from enacting his agenda.
Point of information: Presidentially appointed prosecutors in federal court districts are not AGs (attorneys general) they are United States Attorneys (USAs).
That is all. Carry on.
We know. We said it at the time.
Now what are they going to do about it?
Arguably the defining characteristic of the American political system is how “far-right conspiracy theories” have a close to 100% record of being correct.
Heh. Rule of Law was and still is OPTIONAL for the Democrats.
At the rate institutions, government and otherwise, are destroying their own credibility and moral authority we are well within reach of total breakdown of society.
Given what we now know. A dumb black female SCOTUS justice is better than malignant pale male Inquisitor.
The vile, stupid and evil Dhimmi-crat neo-communists/Islamofascists acting like/exposed as brazenly lawless, totalitarian thugs… shocking, LOL.
yeah,,they are shocked so they can feign responsibility for the agenda of the known leftists
while they themselves probably supported dem causes until it got to late and then they moved over and voted trump and/or gop
“ Although Obama and his “wingman” Attorney General Eric Holder began the process of weaponizing the Justice Department…”
Oh, please. Spare me! When has the justice department ever not been weponised?.
The justice departments were never so blatantly partisan as they were under Obama and Biden.
Evidence that it was weaponized before 2009?
So….. how about we see the emails from the same time period regarding Biden’s classified docs problem? and how conveniently Pence and others put themselves out there to “show” how fair the DoJ was being.
I also want to see the operations doc about the “going in hot spectacle” and coordination with the Secret Service as well as the potential that Mar a Lago was hosting ViPs with their own security details. That there wasn’t an “oopsie” was always a fluke.
I distinctly remember being admonished by multiple commenters on multiple sites — commenters purporting to be at least sympathetic to Republicans — that Garland’s limited tenure as attorney general would be far more damaging than letting him be on the Supreme Court would have been.
This as at the same time Leftists on social media were gloating that Republicans would regret keeping Garland off the Supreme Court.
No, we do not regret any such thing. By now, I’d think it’s more likely that 0bama regrets nominating him for it. An argument can be made that Garland’s malign influence in both his and Biden’s administrations has largely been the architect of the 2024 outcome and resulting policy onslaught from President Trump.
Of all the cast members of the Biden Administration, Garland and Mayorkas are the two that most richly deserve hanging. If Trump does nothing else, he has to make this happen, or confirm for us that what used to be our country is lost forever to us.
The Mar-a-Lago raid had two goals: The stated goal and the actual goal. Trump declassified the Crossfire Hurricane documents detailing the FBI ‘misbehavior’ before leaving office, which the DOJ promptly slow-walked the redaction process until after the Bidens took office, and immediately had Biden reclassify the document in order to hide their actions, BUT Trump took a copy of the CH documents with him. Since you can’t (re)classify a document until you have control of all copies, that put the FBI in a bind. In the several visits they made during the Biden admin, looking for misplaced documents (like all administrations do when moving out), none of the agents spotted the CH document so they could grab it, but there was this safe that Trump refused to let them into because it had his personal documents in it…which means they needed a raid with none of the Trump lawyers looking over their shoulder and objecting to seeing the CH documents spirited away. So they reviewed a number of boxes held by GSA outside of MAL, had them shipped to MAL, then carried out the raid to grab documents they already *knew* were there because they had them shipped there (hence, the pre-printed covers). In the process, they broke into the safe and found it empty (because Trump is smarter than them), grabbed a bunch of lawyer-client privliged materal (despite the presence of a filter team that was supposed to prevent it) and other personal documents they had to return later. Now they had their tissue-thin Narrative to wave around in order to keep him from being elected again: Trump stole classified documents, we *had* to recover them, we’re going to prosecute him. Their immediate problem was Trump had the Executive authority to declassify *anything* they found when it was being shipped out of the White House. Their more serious problem was the case went to a judge who actually knew her stuff instead of being a Dem lacky. And their third and even more serious problem was these idiots wrote *down* what they did, and we’re seeing those documents being published right now.
You are the only one I’ve read yet who “gets it”.
As this thing was breaking, I learned the true scope o the president’s plenipotentiary authority over what is/is not “classiphied”. his goes to the point that when HE removes a document out o govenmnt achives, that act in itselph declassiphies it. Thus when he took that CH document he, by that very act, declassiphied it. Thus by law any docs at Mar a Lago were no longer classiphied. End o game.
I knew at the time theve was SOMETHING the incoming pheds desparately wanted, and wanted ALL copies. Niw we know that was the CH packet. I hink there were twelve copies. Trump had declassiphid and removed one. Somehow he smelt their game and so hid that one well. hat meant they could not make the whole boondoggle vapourise. Thus they illegally raided his private residence. Now the likes o Garland and his sidekicks will have to learn howto jig to Tump’s well tuned violin. It will look veal good on ’em. Cant happen soon enough. And as those dominoes go down in their long row, may many ore o th evil conspirators go down with them. Pile ALL the rats on the ship prior to her sinking. The more the merrier. A good housecleaning is long overdue.
I wonder if the Democrats will give us a long lecture on “Due Process” about this? LOL.
This is not nearly the smoking gun that Republicans are making it out to be. Yes, the FBI’s Washington Field Office did not believe there was probable cause for the raid — but DOJ did. And it’s not the FBI’s role to make that call.
Legally it was Garland’s call, and he can simply say that he considered the WFO’s arguments and was not convinced by them, and that he honestly believed that there was probable cause. We can feel that he’s lying, but how could we possibly prove it?
As always, an honest person must consider how it would look in reverse. Suppose the Trump DOJ wanted to search the Biden archive at the University of Delaware, for evidence of his corruption as senator or as VP (assuming there was a statute of limitations that had not yet passed). And suppose the FBI pushed back and said there was no probable cause, but DOJ believed there was. Wouldn’t it be Bondi’s call? And would we condemn her if she overrode the FBI’s concerns?
The criterion can’t simply be “We know that we’re honest and the Dems are not”, even though that’s true.
Well at least he isn’t on SCOTUS, we dodged that bullet.
Yawn. Wake me up when someone of substance goes to FPMITA prison.