Lawyers for former President Trump searched his properties for documents in order to be in full compliance with a grand jury subpoena from May to turn over all materials bearing classified markings, according to a Wednesday report by The Washington Post.
Trump’s legal team hired an outside firm with expertise in document searches to scan the properties, sources told the Post, and a team in Florida found at least two items marked classified at a storage unit used by the former President in West Palm Beach. Those were immediately turned over to the FBI, according to sources.
However, the attorneys told the Justice Department that the outside team did not turn up any new classified material during their searches of Trump Tower in Manhattan or Trump’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, the Post reported.
The FBI had been invited to observe the searches, but the agency declined, the sources said. It would be unusual for federal agents to observe a search of private property conducted by anyone outside their own law enforcement agency.
On August 8, roughly 11,000 documents were taken by FBI agents from Trump’s Florida country club Mar-a-Lago as part of a search warrant on that residence.
On November 18, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed veteran career prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel to determine whether criminal charges should be filed against Trump for his transporting of those documents from the White House, and also for his role in the deadly January 6, 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol and the attempt to overturn the 2020 Presidential election.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment on the searches conducted by the Trump legal team.
