(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The FBI has released new emails from the Biden-era bureau, showing that agents doubted that there was probable cause to raid Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as part of the Justice Department’s classified documents investigation.
The documents and the wider case stem from Trump taking dozens of boxes of records from the White House when he left office in January 2021. Some of the documents he took were classified.
Trump returned hundreds of those documents to the National Archives and Records Administration in early and mid 2022, but the Justice Department sought to raid his estate to take all of them.
By July of that year, the FBI was expressing doubts that the DOJ had the probable cause to do so. Instead, the FBI encouraged officials to continue working with Trump’s team, the newly released FBI emails show.
Received shocking new docs 2day from DOJ & FBI showing FBI DID NOT BELIEVE IT HAD PROBABLE CAUSE to raid Pres Trump's Mar-a-Lago home but Biden DOJ pushed for it anyway
Based on the records Mar-a-Lago raid was a miscarriage of justice
Read for urself: https://t.co/qbJNT0tcRE pic.twitter.com/ljWdjndhHE— Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) December 16, 2025
“[The FBI] does not believe … that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar a Lago,” says a July 20, 2022, email from the bureau’s Washington DC field office.
“A reasonable step would be to recontact [Trump’s] attorney and inquire about any further documents,” the email adds.
By early August, the FBI was resigned to the fact that agents would likely raid Mar-a-Lago, according to the newly released emails. A top FBI official encouraged agents to conduct the search as reasonably as possible.
“Since we heard Mr. Toscas say yesterday in the call that he ‘frankly doesn’t give a damn about the optics’ and Mr. Bratt has already built an antagonistic relationship with (Trump) attorneys…I think it is more than fair to say that the DOJ contact with (Trump attorney) just prior to the execution of the warrant will not go well. DOJ said as much yesterday,” the agent wrote on August 4, 2022.
DOJ (Bratt, Toscas, Matt Olsen, and presumably Lisa Monaco) and Washington FBI field office went back and forth for 2 months over the necessity of the search warrant. This is a July 2022 email from the WFO again reiterating agents did not think probable cause (PC) existed to seek… pic.twitter.com/ncnSjnrLb2
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) December 16, 2025
“I also think that it is fair to say that if FBI calls, having in mind officer safety, to the optics of the search, and the desire to conduct this search in a professional and low key manner, there is a far better chance that the execution will go more smoothly and we may actually gain some measure of cooperation, which could go some way to resolving the mishandling of classified records investigation that is being conducted.”
For days later, the FBI conducted the search after a warrant was approved by U.S. Judge Bruce Reinhart—a former DOJ attorney who worked in the office that was investigating sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein in 2007, only to go on to work for Epstein a year later.
Trump was indicted in the classified documents case in 2023, but Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the charges a year later. The case went totally by the wayside after Trump won the election in November 2024.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
