The picture of the Biden administration’s weaponization of federal law enforcement keeps getting uglier. New records that Judicial Watch obtained reveal that the FBI’s own agents believed there was no legal basis for the Aug. 8, 2022, raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, and they said so repeatedly.
The Biden DOJ didn’t care.
We obtained 207 pages of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records that reveal the FBI’s concerns about the legal basis for the raid of then-former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
The records expose deep concerns within the FBI itself, including explicit objections from field agents who warned the U.S. Department of Justice that the unprecedented August 8, 2022, raid on Trump’s home lacked probable cause.
We uncovered the documents in response to a March 11, 2026, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding the counterintelligence investigation codenamed Plasmic Echo—a “sensitive investigative matter” launched following a referral from the National Archives and Records Administration.
The records include a July 13, 2022, email between FBI field agents explicitly stating they did not believe probable cause existed to search Mar-a-Lago and urging the Justice Department to cooperate with Trump’s attorney instead of insisting on a raid
We know that then-Attorney General Merrick Garland personally signed off on the raid. But the agents actually doing the work weren’t on board. A July 13, 2022, email from the Washington Field Office said, “WFO does not believe (and has articulated to DOJ CES), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant at Mar a Lago. DOJ has opined that they do, requesting a wide scope including residence, office, storage space.”
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The agents argued that the most efficient path to recovering any classified documents would have been cooperation with Trump’s attorney, Evan Corcoran. Instead, the DOJ buried that option and demanded a raid.
The records show FBI agents spent five weeks pushing back on the probable cause question, time they said was “counterproductive” to the stated goal of protecting classified information.
DOJ has inquired as to an Ops [operations] Plan for a SW of MAL. WFO relayed that we are not in agreement for PC [probable cause] on the SW [search warrant]. WFO has an Ops Plan in place that will/can be quickly updated between FBI/MM [Miami] and FBI/WF, however, [Redacted] does not believe we have PC for the 45 [Trump] Office or the bedroom due to recency and issues of boxes versus classified information. Therefore, as we are in disagreement on the SW and its scope, we are not yet finalizing a SW as we are missing relevant logistics and details.
Now, there’s the matter of the Biden White House itself.
A May 10, 2022, email shows coordination between the FBI, the DOJ, and Biden’s White House Counsel’s Office. This wasn’t the DOJ operating independently. The Biden White House was in the loop.
So to boil this down to its essence, the FBI said there was no probable cause to raid Mar-a-Lago. The Biden White House and the DOJ fought back against this assessment, then went ahead with the raid anyway.
The Biden administration’s use of federal law enforcement against a political opponent was never just aggressive or misguided. These records show it was done against the explicit legal judgment of the agents on the ground. Somehow, the Biden administration’s corruption keeps getting worse and worse, and someone has to be held accountable.
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