Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are preparing to provide Congress with internal emails that they say show FBI officials warned the Justice Department during the Biden administration that there was insufficient probable cause to search former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, officials told Just the News.
The emails are set to be provided to the Senate and House Judiciary Committees as early as Tuesday. This comes ahead of a scheduled deposition on Wednesday from former special prosecutor Jack Smith, who took over the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case just months after the August 2022 raid on Trump’s home—an event that significantly impacted the political landscape leading up to the 2024 election, Just the News reported.
Internal memos prepared by the FBI’s Washington field office indicate that agents did not believe probable cause had been established before the search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, according to a source with direct knowledge of the documents slated to be turned over to Congress.
The source said the memos reflect internal concerns within the FBI about whether the Justice Department, under the Biden administration, had met the legal threshold required to obtain a search warrant. Despite those concerns, prosecutors moved forward with the search, officials told the outlet.
Disagreements among FBI personnel over the decision to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home have been previously reported, but the emails expected to be released provide more detailed accounts of the specific objections raised by agents regarding the sufficiency of probable cause, the outlet reported.
The search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence became a major political flashpoint ahead of the 2024 presidential election and ultimately led to two federal indictments against Trump. Both cases were later dismissed.
Republicans have argued that the prosecutions were politically motivated, a claim the Justice Department has denied, said the report.
As part of its oversight of the federal investigations into Trump, the House Judiciary Committee recently issued a subpoena requiring Special Counsel Jack Smith to sit for a closed-door deposition on Wednesday, Just the News noted further.
“The Committee on the Judiciary is continuing to conduct oversight of the operations of the Office of Special Counsel you led — specifically, your team’s prosecutions of President Donald J. Trump and his co-defendants,” Chairman Jim Jordan wrote in the letter accompanying the subpoena two weeks ago. “Due to your service as Special Counsel, the Committee believes that you possess information that is vital to its oversight of this matter.”
Peter Koski, an attorney representing Smith, said the former special counsel will comply with the subpoena.
Ahead of Smith’s scheduled testimony, House Democrats have sought to compel the release of a classified version of his final report on the investigation. Trump’s legal team has filed court motions seeking to block the report’s release, said the outlet.
Smith may have believed he was untouchable when he led the Biden administration’s high-profile legal campaign against Donald Trump, but a group of Republican lawmakers has made it clear that his alleged misconduct won’t go unanswered.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, joined by a coalition of Republican senators and one congressman, sent a formal letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi in October referring Smith to the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility and two state bar associations for investigation.
The letter accuses the former special counsel of serious professional misconduct that could warrant disbarment, The New York Post reported.
“As part of Jack Smith’s weaponized witch hunt, the Biden DOJ issued subpoenas to several telecommunications companies in 2023 regarding our cell phone records, gaining access to the time, recipient, duration, and location of calls placed on our devices from January 4, 2021, to January 7, 2021,” the letter read.
“We have yet to learn of any legal predicate for the Biden Department of Justice issuing subpoenas to obtain these cell phone records,” the letter added.
