Donald Trump has sued the federal government and asked for a special master to determine what materials seized from Mar-a-Lago could be used in the investigation of him.
The former president filed the lawsuit in US court in the Southern District of Florida Monday afternoon, saying his Fourth Amendment rights had been violated by the seizure of certain documents, including two of his passports.
The bottom line is that a Florida magistrate is preparing to decide whether to unlock the search warrant that led to the raid two weeks ago.
‘Politics should not influence the judiciary. President Donald Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential election and in the 2024 general election, should he decide to run for office,” the lawsuit reads.
It added that the attack on Mar-a-Lago was “shockingly aggressive” and that the action “showed no understanding of the suffering it would cause to most Americans.”
Like all citizens, (Trump) is protected by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Seized goods in violation of his constitutional rights must be returned immediately.”
Donald Trump has sued the federal government and asked for a special master to determine what materials seized from Mar-a-Lago could be used in the investigation into him
The lawsuit revolves between constitutional arguments over the right to protection from unreasonable searches and seizures to some of Trump’s long-held grievances.
“The administration has long treated President Donald J. Trump unfairly,” reads one subject in the lawsuit.
It says the DOJ and FBI “treated Trump differently than any other citizen.”
“Two years of vociferous ‘Russian collusion’ investigations have resulted in the finding of a special counsel of biased FBI agents and officials,” the lawsuit says.
It reads that “text exchanges between the chief agent (Peter Stzrok) and his lover (Lisa Page) reflect their complete disdain and bias against President Trump and his supporters as they were tasked with investigating the farcical Russian collusion claims.”
That’s a reference to the FBI’s “enthusiasts,” lawyers who worked on the investigation and who had exchanged anti-Trump tweets.
A background foreword ahead of the extraordinary raid details Trump and former First Lady Melania Trump’s move to Mar-a-Lago after the 2020 election.
The suit demands that a special master oversee materials seized in the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, calling Donald Trump the “clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries”
“Mar-a-Lago is a historic 58-bedroom, 33-bathroom mansion on 17 acres of land stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway,” the suit emphasizes. A DOJ official was shown a storage area where government documents were kept in addition to clothing
“On January 20, 2021, President Trump and his family left the White House. They moved back to their home in Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. Mar-a-Lago is a historic 58-bedroom, 33-bathroom mansion on 17 acres of land that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway, hence the name, meaning sea-to-lake, the suit says, with language that could be found in a glossy real estate brochure.
The suit details a June 3 visit by DOJ official Jay Bratt, who came amid back and forth about government material kept at Mar-a-Lago.
At one point, Bratt and a group of officials, led by two Secret Service agents, visited a storage room where records were kept.
“The storage area contained boxes, many containing the clothing and personal items of President Trump and the First Lady,” the suit notes.
Trump’s attorneys filed the lawsuit two weeks after the raid, after the government’s case was advanced and media attorneys have already talked to the administration in a case about unlocking the affidavit that preceded the raid.
A US magistrate handling the case said in an injunction Monday that Trump had not intervened in the case.
To show that the administration’s search violated Trump’s constitutional rights, the lawsuit talks about his ongoing role in American politics — even citing multiple opinion polls.
“President Donald J. Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential election and in the 2024 general election, should he decide to run,” the first page reads.
Trump has a small 3 percentage point lead over Joe Biden in the RealClear Politics poll average, a gap within the margin of error of many surveys.
“In addition, his support for the 2022 midterm elections has been decisive for Republican candidates,” it says, expressing Trump’s influence as the former president does on his Truth Social network.
It says after Trump and his family ‘settled back into their home’, Trump ‘voluntarily asked’ [the National Archives] movers to come to Mar-a-Lago to receive 15 boxes of documents.’
The lawsuit also raises the possibility that Trump will argue in court that the retrieved documents — including some at the highest levels of government classification — were released by him.
The suit argues that an internal DOJ “taint team” or “filter team” would not adequately protect Trump’s rights.
“President Trump has determined that documents with classification markings must be searched for even if the marked documents have been released,” it read. The indictment says his staff conducted a “diligent search.”
Trump also addressed the lawsuit in a statement from his Save America PAC.
He called it an “unnecessary, unwarranted and un-American break-in by dozens of FBI agents and others from my home, Mar-a-Lago.”
“They demanded that the security cameras be turned off, a request that we rightly rejected. They prevented my lawyers from seeing what was taken during the raid and said “absolutely not”. They took documents that were under the privilege of client-lawyer and executive, which is not allowed. They took my passports. They even brought a “safe-cracker” and successfully broke into my personal safe, which revealed… nothing!’ Trump wrote.
“We further demand that the DOJ be forced to transfer a REAL, no ‘plants’ inventory of my property that was taken and disclose where that property is now. We demand that any items improperly taken from my home be returned IMMEDIATELY,” he continued, returning to his accusation, without providing evidence, that FBI agents posted material during the search.