Trump Claims The FBI Stole Three of His Passports; The FBI Admits It Took Documents Protected by Attorney-Client Privilege

Trump says the FBI seized three of his passports in their raid.

Former President Donald Trump said the FBI seized three of his passports during its raid on Mar-a-Lago last week, calling the unprecedented search an "assault."

"Wow! In the raid by the FBI of Mar-a-Lago, they stole my three Passports (one expired), along with everything else," Trump posted on his Truth Social account. "This is an assault on a political opponent at a level never seen before in our Country."

He added: "Third World!"

The FBI carried out a search warrant at the former president's private residence in Palm Beach, Florida, last week, as agents seized classified records, including some marked as top secret. Trump is disputing the classification of those records, saying the records have been declassified.

Sources familiar with the investigation told Fox News Digital over the weekend that the FBI also seized boxes containing records covered by attorney-client privilege and potentially executive privilege during its raid.

Sources familiar with the investigation told Fox News Saturday that the former president's team was informed that boxes labeled A-14, A-26, A-43, A-13, A-33, as well as a set of documents -- all seen on the final page of the FBI's unsealed property receipt -- contained information covered by attorney-client privilege.

Whoops -- they took attorney-client privilege documents when searching for National Archives papers.

Megyn Kelly says "Bull. Shit!"

This is about January 6. If you believe this has to do with classified documents, having to do with bullshit Trump took with him when he left office, your head is in the sky. This is about January 6 and the never-ending desire to get Donald Trump on something. They don't want him to run for election again. They're mad that he did not get convicted on the first or second impeachment, they are mad that he did not get pursued criminally by the New York D.A.

They are mad Russia-gate fell apart and they are made he is ahead in the polls, crushing DeSantis, and that his candidates of choice all [won primaries] last week, and the Democrats are prepared to play dirty.

[Attorney General] Merrick Garland is clearly willing to go along with that. He's been moving in, in concentric circles toward Donald Trump over the past several weeks, going after his top advisor with subpoenas, we've seen close Trump advisors in handcuffs, dragged away as if they're like mobsters. This is really getting alarming and the American public deserves answers.

Kash Patel says that the secret agenda here is to gin up another Fake Russiagate so that all of the Russiagate documents Trump declassified can be re-classified.

President Trump named me his -- his representative to the National Archives months ago. And we have been in a bureaucratic battle. As Devin and I have always had to, we found whole sets of documents we meted out to the American public from Russiagate. We got out about 60 percent.

That's why President Trump made it his mission to declassify and be transparent. In October of 2020, he issued a sweeping declassification order for every Russiagate document and every single Hillary Clinton document. Then, on the way out of the White House, he issued further declassification orders, declassifying whole sets of documents.

And this is a key fact that most Americans are missing. President Trump, as the sitting president, is the unilateral authority for declassification. He can literally stand over a set of documents and say, these are now declassified, and that is done with definitive action immediately.

The fact that the bureaucrats at NARA, who referred -- remember, the National Archives are the ones that referred this to the Department of Justice. But they -- the same principle failed to refer Hillary Clinton to the Department of Justice when they got their hands on the classified e-mails from those servers.

And switching gears a little bit to the national security officials involved, me, as a former national security prosecutor in the National Security Division, where this case is being run out of, it's no surprise that the likes of John Carlin, who was the assistant attorney general for national security, who authorized the Russiagate hoax to begin with, is now the number three officials at DOJ.

And Lisa Monaco is the number two official, who was his superior back then.

These folks -- and this is -- this is a thing I want to stress with. Now that this is a -- quote, unquote -- "ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation," they will come out to the American public and be able to say, ongoing C.I. investigation. You will never be allowed to see the Russiagate docs or any other docs that President Trump lawfully declassified.

And they will hide it from the public.

And Congress has a monumental lift ahead of them. Come November, they better start subpoenaing these documents immediately and putting these people before the American public. Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray have failed in their mission to uphold the law. They have become political hucksters. And they are completely destroying our Constitution and putting on a two-tiered system of justice.

John Solomon had a scoop last month -- the Justice Department once again committed gross and illegal insubordination by defying a valid presidential order, refusing to declassify the Russiagate documents Trump ordered declassified. Only on January 19th, 2020, hours before Trump left office, did they sneak over a note to Trump stating that they would have to take a look at the documents he'd ordered declassified and examine them for further redactions.

That's bureaucratese for "We're ignoring your order and we've let the clock run out on your presidency and now we've fortified the election so there's a new president and the Deep State always wins, ha-ha."

If a lot of these documents the feds seized were Russiagate documents -- and I bet they were -- then these "classified" documents were not in fact "classified."

In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents.

The previously untold story of how highly anticipated declassified material never became public is contained in a memo obtained by Just the News from the National Archives that was written by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just hours before Trump left office on noon of Jan. 20, 2021.

Meadows' memo confirmed prior reporting by Just the News that Trump on Jan. 19, 2021 declassified a binder of hundreds of pages of sensitive FBI documents that show how the bureau used informants and FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and misled both a federal court and Congress about flaws in the evidence they offered to get approval for the investigation.

The declassified documents included transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

In the end, multiple investigations found there was no such collusion and that the FBI violated rules and misled the FISA court in an effort to keep the probe going.

The documents that Trump declassified never saw the light of day, even though they were lawfully declassified by Trump and the DOJ was instructed by the president though Meadows to expeditiously release them after redacting private information as necessary.

"I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the Department of Justice (including all that appear to have a potential to raise privacy concerns) with the instruction that the Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied," Meadows wrote in the memo.

Just the News obtained the memo after going to the Trump collection at the National Archives and asking it to look for the binder of documents Trump had declassified. The Archives said it did not possess the documents, the Justice Department did and provided a copy of Meadows' memo.

In an interview Tuesday night on the "Just the News, Not Noise" television show, Meadows said he was dismayed that DOJ ignored a lawful instruction from a sitting president and said it was part of a larger dynamic in which the permanent federal bureaucracy repeatedly tied to undercut Trump to protect itself.

People need to go to prison.

posted by Ace at 06:23 PM

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