When the FBI raided the former First Family's Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida on Monday morning, investigators combed through Melania Trump's clothes and spent many hours searching through Donald Trump's private office, cracking open his safe, and searching through drawers.
The 3,000 square-foot private residences of the Trump family, as well as a separate office, safe, and a locked basement storage room where 15 cardboard boxes of White House materials were kept, were all the targets of the raid by over 30 plain clothes FBI agents from the Washington Field Office and the Southern District of Florida. Feds showed up at 9 a.m. and stayed till 6:30 p.m.
Trump's attorneys were denied access to the 128-room building during the search, which lasted more than nine hours, prompting a source close to the former president to express worry that the FBI agents or DOJ lawyers overseeing the investigation may have "planted stuff."
The New York Post has discovered that the FBI's entry into the opulent Palm Beach house was based purely on a search warrant that targeted presidential documents and any indications that sensitive data was being kept there.
According to a source, the General Services Administration had packed the boxes and delivered them to Mar-a-Lago when Trump left office in January 2020.
Federal investigators seized all of the boxes, according to a witness to the raid, on Monday, but it is unclear if anything else was taken because the FBI did not offer an itemized list of what was taken. Documents and souvenirs from Trump's presidency are apparently included in the boxes, along with letters from Kim Jong Un and Barack Obama and other correspondence with foreign leaders.
Based on the reports, Trump's legal team, led by Evan Corcoran, had been working closely with federal officials to surrender the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration. FBI investigators spent several hours rummaging through the boxes after Corcoran gave them access to the windowless storage space at Mar-a-Lago in June. Someone who was present claims that at one point, Trump dropped by the basement to say hi.
Only a minimal staff, including groundskeepers, were present during the raid on Monday because Mar-a-Lago is closed for the year. Since then, the Trump family has relocated to his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, for the summer.
U.S. Secret Service (USSS) operatives stationed at the entrance gates and carrying M4 carbines are thought to have provided access to the 20-acre private country club.
