Former President Donald Trump over the weekend asked for documents obtained by the FBI to be returned to him — via a post on Truth Social, instead of his lawyers. The former president made the request on Sunday. It seemed worded as if Trump expected it to have legal standing. “Oh great!” Trump wrote. “It was just learned that the FBI, in its now famous Mar-a-Lago raid, took boxes of privileged ‘attorney-client’ material and also ‘executive’ privileged material, which they knowingly should not have taken. copy of this TRUTH, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were obtained. Thanks!” Truth Social – essentially a Twitter clone with a MAGA sensibility – refers to individual posts as “truths” and the corresponding retweet is the “repeat” of a message. The documents Trump has asked to be returned are ones he claims have been covered by attorney-client privilege and executive privilege since he was in office. Neither Trump nor the Justice Department immediately responded to Insider’s request for comment on the allegations. The nature of the documents is unclear. Trump appeared to be responding to a Fox News story that identified five boxes and another set of documents that had the potential to be protected. The elements are what are called here: A portion of a legal document containing evidence taken from Mar-a-Lago by FBI agents executing a search warrant on Aug. 8. United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida Fox did not name its sources for the story, which described interactions between the Justice Department and Trump’s legal team. Posting on social media, as Trump did, is not generally considered a valid way to make a legal request. Insider was unable to locate any public documents that were an official version of Trump’s request. The Fox story, however, described a timid way in which the Trump camp sought the return of some of the records. It said Trump’s lawyers had asked the Justice Department if it would support the court appointing an independent official to review the records. According to Fox, the department said no. Beyond his claims of privilege, Trump has argued in other ways that possession of the documents was not a problem and that the department should have released them to him. On Friday, he said all the classified documents he took with him from the White House were automatically declassified by a standing order he had created. A statement from his office, read on Fox News, said: “Everyone ends up bringing their work home from time to time. American presidents are no different.” The statement did not address the fact that Trump ceased to be president when he left office on Jan. 20, 2021, at which point all presidential duties fell to President Joe Biden. Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, called the claim “ballooning.” He said declassification was a long and complicated process that Trump could not carry out by default. Tom Dupree, a former lawyer for the Ministry of Justice, confirmed that a process had to be followed and told the BBC it was not clear if that had happened. Trump supporters have made increasingly outlandish calls for action in response to the raid, including Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky calling for the repeal of the Espionage Act, one of three statutes Trump has allegedly violated. Meanwhile, several far-right GOP members also criticized the FBI, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia calling for the agency to be defunded and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado calling for an investigation into the raid.
