According to an official from the Justice Department who spoke with NBC News, the passports that belonged to former President Donald Trump were given back to him after the raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Newsmax is reporting that the FBI has confirmed that it did indeed take the passports on the same day that Trump stated in the post he published on his Truth Social account, noting that FBI agents who conducted the raid on his home took them.
“A law enforcement source told CBS News that the passports were returned after they were discovered by a ‘filter team’ of federal investigators who screen the items seized during the execution of a search warrant for privileged or extraneous information,” the report continued.
The FBI then went on to deliver a statement where the agency revealed that when they are executing search warrants, it “follows search and seizure procedures ordered by courts, then returns items that we do not need to be retained for law enforcement purposes.”
Former President Trump went on to say in a statement written on Truth Social that FBI agents “stole my three passports (one expired), along with everything else.”
This seems like a rather weird procedure, to take things that aren’t even on the list of items for agents to be searching for during the raid of a person’s home. What’s the point of that if you’re just going to turn around and give them back?
Something seems mighty strange about that, don’t you think?
Trump then went on to proclaim, “this was an assault on a political opponent at a level never seen before in our country. Third World!”
“However, top Justice Department official Jay Bratt had already sent an email to Trump’s lawyers informing them that the passports had been taken and would be returned before the former president’s accusation that the FBI stole his passports, according to CBS News,” the report from Newsmax said.
That email then said, “We have learned that the filter agents seized three passports belonging to President Trump, two expired and one being his active diplomatic passport. We are returning them, and they will be ready for pickup at WFO [the FBI’s Washington field office] at 2 pm today.”
However, Christina Bobb, an attorney for Trump, made an appearance on “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News, stating that “this goes to show the level of audacity that [the FBI] have.”
Bobb then stated that “it goes to show how aggressive they were, how overreaching they were, that they were willing to go past the four corners of the warrant and take whatever they felt was appropriate, or they felt that they could take and then go back through and look through everything.”
No matter how you cut the mustard, the FBI looks real, real bad. Like massively awful. Most people seem to be able to see through the nonsense that the federal government is spewing forth, recognizing this was likely an assault against Trump to try and remove him from the 2024 picture.
If that is not the case, then this whole raid was really carried out in an inept manner.
