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The Department of Justice gave Trump back his passport yesterday.
According to Maggie Haberman, “The FBI handed Trump’s passport over to him today. In the email that went to his lawyers, there was a reference to a ‘filter team.’ This means that there is a separate group of people who are looking through the evidence and taking out anything privileged or not related to the case.”
Using a filter team is good news for Trump but leaves the question was the search warrant overbroad? Trump said yesterday:
“It’s a very sad situation when something like this happens,” he said. “My original thought was just go in and take it because you’d be guilty of a crime if you don’t. But I changed my mind.”
“I was thinking about it and I said, ‘You know what? I don’t have to do that. I’ll just leave it to other people,'” he added. “It’s a very, very sad day when something like this happens.”
But now that his passport has been returned, Trump is ready to move on.
“I’m very glad that my passport has been returned,” he said in a statement released by his lawyers. “Now I can continue to travel the world and defend the honor of our great country.”
According to the federal warrant, FBI agents took 27 boxes of documents from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Among other things, the agents seized an ‘Executive Grant of Clemency: Re Roger Jason Stone Jr’ – a document about former Trump adviser Roger Stone, who Trump pardoned during his final days in office – and information regarding the President of France.
For example, the term “TS/SCI documents” refers to a variety of classified/TS/SCI papers. The following are some additional generic labels: “Various classified/TS/SCI papers.” In the national security sector, the abbreviation ‘TS/SCI’ generally stands for Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information – available only to those with the highest level of clearance.
The warrant also authorized the agents to seize ‘electronic devices,’ which could include laptops, cell phones, and storage drives.
It’s not clear what the agents were looking for, but the warrant indicates that they were seeking evidence of ‘the commission of a crime.’
Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani has called the raid ‘unprecedented’ and ‘poetic justice,’ while Trump himself has called it a ‘witch hunt.’
The Department of Justice has not commented on the raid.
The Department of Justice has given back the passports to President Donald Trump that were seized during a raid on his Mar-a-Lago resort last week.
Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had complained that the seizure was a political act by the Biden administration.
“Breaking into the home of a former president is a political act — particularly since you’re breaking precedent,” he told the New York Post. “All of a sudden, you’re the first president of the United States who introduced the banana-republic process of prosecuting your predecessor. We’ve avoided it for 240 years. Trump didn’t do it to Hillary. Ford didn’t do it.”
But the DOJ said in a statement that the passports were taken as part of a “court-authorized seizure” and that they had been returned to Trump.
The DOJ did not say why the passports were seized or what they were being used for. But ABC News reported that investigators are looking into whether Trump violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act by trying to broker deals in other countries after he left office.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing and has called the investigation a “witch hunt.”
