The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago on Monday afternoon, and the news came out by Monday evening. The MAGA crew immediately went into meltdown mode, threatening violent civil war and promising to attack and destroy the FBI and Department of Justice. Their little terrorist hashtags were getting a workout for about 36 hours. What was interesting is that Law Twitter pointed out something pretty obvious: when the FBI executed a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago, then Trump would obviously have a copy of the warrant. That’s the way it works. It’s up to Trump to confirm what was searched and booked into evidence, and Trump knows exactly what was in the FBI’s warrant. So now #ReleasetheWarrant is the hashtag. Meanwhile, WaPo has some info about why the raid was almost certainly about Trump’s theft of classified material.

In the months before the FBI’s dramatic move to execute a search warrant at former president Donald Trump’s Florida home and open his safe to look for items, federal authorities grew increasingly concerned that Trump or his lawyers and aides had not, in fact, returned all the documents and other material that were government property, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Officials became suspicious that when Trump gave 15 boxes of items to the National Archives about seven months ago, either the former president or people close to him held on to key records — despite a Justice Department investigation into the handling of classified and other material that had been sent to the former president’s private club and residence in the waning days of his administration.

Over months of discussions about whether documents were still missing, some officials also came to suspect Trump’s representatives were not truthful at times, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

On Tuesday, a lawyer for Trump said the agents who brought the court-approved warrant to Mar-a-Lago a day earlier took about 12 more boxes after conducting their search.

People familiar with the investigation said that Justice Department and FBI officials traveled to Mar-a-Lago this spring, a meeting first reported by CNN. The officials spoke to Trump’s representatives, inspected the storage space where documents were held, and expressed concern that the former president or people close to him still had items that should be in government custody, these people said.

By that point, officials at the National Archives had been aggressively contacting people in Trump’s orbit to demand the return of documents they believed were covered by the Presidential Records Act, said two people familiar with those inquiries. Like the others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigation.

[From WaPo]

LMAO @ “officials at the National Archives had been aggressively contacting people in Trump’s orbit to demand the return of documents” – aggressive archivists were contacting liars and terrorists who stole classified material! Jeez, WaPo. Anyway, the Post spoke to one of Trump’s lawyers, Christina Bobb, who said that DOJ officials came to Mar-a-Lago this spring to search through dozens of boxes in a Mar-a-Lago storage area. Then in June, the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section at the Justice Department came down to MAL and met with Trump’s people about the classified documents and Trump “stopped by the meeting” but was not interviewed.

Anyway, it sounds like the DOJ had gone above and beyond to settle this issue of stolen classified material quietly and without having to execute a search warrant, only to be largely rebuffed by Trump and his people. I also think there is a good chance that some of the missing/withheld classified material could be long gone by now, flushed down various MAL toilets. Which is a whole other issue.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.