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A judge has ordered a hearing to unseal the affidavit backing the search warrant used in the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago.
The order read as follows: “taking under advisement 4 the Motion to Unseal the search warrant materials, including attachments. The intervenors having requested a hearing, it is ORDERED that an IN PERSON Hearing will be held on 8/18/2022 at 1 PM in the West Palm Beach Division before Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart.”
The hearing will take place this Thursday at 1 PM ET in the West Palm Beach Division. It is unclear what exactly will be discussed during the hearing, but it could provide new insight into the FBI’s investigation into Mar-a-Lago and its employees.
On Monday, a lawyer for former President Trump knocked the FBI’s seizure list of goods taken from Mar-a-Lago last week as “borderline useless.”
“I don’t know anything about the items that were removed, but we’ve heard from a lot of people in our community.” Lindsey Halligan, a lawyer who was at the property during the search, told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that information on what the FBI took is little to them and whether some of it was appropriate for the federal government to get.
“We don’t know precisely what they took, and that’s a problem,” Halligan said. “The only thing that we were given was a list of item numbers, no description, no context.”
Halligan added that she and her team are “trying to get to the bottom” of what was seized.
“We’re not sure if they took privileged information or not, and that’s a real problem,” she said.
“We don’t know exactly what they took. We have asked multiple times for a real inventory description of what was taken. But the inventory list they gave us is borderline worthless. It doesn’t say where the documents were located, what specifically was taken.”
Trump attorney Alan Garten said the inventory list of items seized during the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago is “borderline worthless.”
Garten made the comments during a hearing on Monday in which he argued that the Justice Department should return items seized during the raid to Trump’s attorneys.
Halligan mentioned Trump’s prior remarks in which he accused agents of “stealing” three of his passports during the search.
Later, multiple news outlets confirmed with officials from the Department of Justice that the former President’s attorneys had received his passports back.
The FBI delivered a response: “[The raid] follows search and seizure procedures ordered by courts, then returns items that do not need to be retained for law enforcement purposes.”
According to Slager, however, the Department of Justice had no contact with Trump or his team.
“The fact that we haven’t heard anything from the DOJ is concerning,” Halligan said. “We don’t even know what they have.”
“We have real concerns in terms of whether they were right to take certain things. The Department of Justice is not communicating with us as to what the evidence is and what their intentions are. But we will continue to try to get to the bottom of it.”
Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he would issue a ruling on the matter by the end of the week.
