New documents obtained from the National Archives appear to reveal the direct involvement of the Biden Administration in the FBI’s controversial and widely-panned raid on President Donald Trump’s residence in Florida last year.
As reported by Breitbart, the documents were obtained by the legal watchdog group America First Legal (AFL). At the time of the raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on August 8th, 2022, the Biden Administration claimed that it was “stunned” by the development, while the National Archives claimed that it had “not been involved in the DOJ investigation.” The excuse that the FBI and Attorney General Merrick Garland gave for carrying out the authoritarian and unprecedented raid was that President Trump allegedly possessed several classified documents, which had to be returned to the National Archives.
However, the new documents reveal that the National Archives ultimately did cooperate with the Biden FBI and DOJ due to a “special access request” from the Biden Administration, which was filed on behalf of the DOJ.
One of the facts exposed by the documents is that John Laster, the Archives official responsible for handling all access requests for presidential records, was in direct communication with the FBI as he discussed preparing the seized Trump documents for FBI review on August 23rd, 2022.
In October, the National Archives told senior Republicans Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and James Comer (R-Ky.) about the Trump documents, which the Archives “discovered that they contained classified national security information,” at which point “NARA’s OIG (Office of the Inspector General) subsequently referred the matter to DOJ on February 9, 2022.”
But the discrepancy arises from Laster’s decision to directly coordinate with the FBI himself, thus discrediting the Archives’ claims that the OIG acted independently of the Archives’ leadership. Furthermore, the Biden Administration’s attempt to use “special access request” as a pretext for a law enforcement raid is an unprecedented abuse of presidential records law.
“The special access statute authorizes special access requests to an incumbent president only when the records in question are needed for ‘the conduct of current business’ of the White House,” a spokesman for America First Legal explained further. “Providing documents to the DOJ for purposes of a criminal investigation is not the ‘current business’ of the White House.”
Reed Rubinstein, senior counselor at AFL, added that “the evidence further suggests that Biden officials in the Executive Office of the President and the Department of Justice unlawfully abused their power and then lied about it to the American people.”
“This government, it seems, acknowledges no limits on its power to harass, intimidate, and silence its political opponents,” Rubinstein continued.
The raid on Mar-a-Lago almost immediately drew comparisons to authoritarian tactics employed in third-world nations and dictatorships, and thus was widely condemned both in the United States and abroad.