A recently disclosed email shows that top Garland associates raised the issue of declassification before the morning raid. Although the memo requested that lawyers check whether Trump had the authority to declassify documents, Garland personally approved the August 2022 raid, which included searching Melania Trump’s underwear drawers.
A top Biden Justice Department official and key ally of then-Attorney General Merrick Garland raised legal “concerns” about the FBI’s raid on Mar-Lago, warning that then-former President Donald Trump may have actually declassified the records seized by agents, a newly-unearthed email obtained by Just the News shows.
Patty Stemler, a decades-long DOJ veteran who was reportedly picked by Garland in 2022 to help consult on Trump-related cases, sent an email just two days after the bureau’s Aug. 8, 2022 raid of Trump’s Florida resort home, where Stemler said she had “a few concerns.”
Stemler sent the email to Sophia Brill, a future Biden White House lawyer and then an attorney inside DOJ’s National Security Division, which played a central role in this anti-Trump inquiry.
The memo was recently discovered by the Justice Department as part of its investigation into the weaponization of federal law enforcement.
“I didn’t know about this search in advance, but I have been worrying about it ever since and worrying more now,” Stemler wrote to Brill on Aug. 10, 2022. “Doesn’t Trump maintain that he had the authority to declassify documents while he was still President?
“Has anyone in NSD or OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] looked at that? I know we have procedures for declassifying, but is the President as Commander in Chief bound by those procedures? We also have procedures for granting pardons, but the President doesn’t have to follow them,” she added.