President Biden insisted Wednesday that he had “zero” superior warning of the FBI’s Aug. 8 raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property — after it emerged his administration had known as within the feds to look at an preliminary haul of labeled paperwork retrieved from the forty fifth president earlier this 12 months.
“I didn’t have any advance discover,” Biden mentioned in response to a query from Fox Information correspondent Peter Doocy.
“None, zero, not one single bit,” the president added after wrapping up a speech on his scholar mortgage debt reduction plans.
Biden’s response got here a day after public authorities correspondence with Trump’s authorized workforce revealed the White Home counsel’s workplace had requested the Nationwide Archives on April 11 to “present the FBI entry” to the preliminary batch of 15 containers seized from Mar-a-Lago. It’s unclear whether or not Biden himself knew or accredited of that request.
In a Might 10 letter, which was solely made public this week, appearing archivist Debra Steidel Wall had advised Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran that she would flip the paperwork over to federal investigators and ignore the previous president’s claims of govt privilege.
Weeks earlier, the previous president’s legal professionals had sought extra time to assessment the contents of the containers earlier than the Nationwide Archives turned them over to the FBI.
Corcoran had mentioned he wished to see if any particular doc was topic to govt privilege — and due to this fact exempt from disclosure, in keeping with Wall’s letter.
Within the missive, Wall rejected that declare, saying Supreme Courtroom precedent “strongly suggests {that a} former President might not efficiently assert govt privilege ‘in opposition to the very Government Department in whose title the privilege is invoked.’”
Wall added that the Justice Division had “no precedent for an assertion of govt privilege by a former President in opposition to an incumbent President to stop the latter” from acquiring from the Nationwide Archives presidential data that belong to the federal authorities.
The letter — posted on the Nationwide Archives web site on Tuesday after being printed late Monday by JustTheNews — mentioned the FBI would have entry to the data starting Might 12.
The Nationwide Archives revealed in February that it had requested the Justice Division to analyze after discovering labeled materials among the many 15 containers taken from Mar-a-Lago earlier this 12 months.
The day after Wall’s letter, a grand jury issued a subpoena for paperwork bearing classification markings that have been nonetheless held by Trump. Then, on June 3, DOJ and FBI officers arrived at Mar-a-Lago to retrieve paperwork from the previous president’s attorneys.
The FBI obtained a search warrant on Aug. 5 on the idea extra labeled supplies have been nonetheless being saved at Mar-a-Lago.
When federal brokers raided Trump’s property three days later, they seized 27 containers of supplies, together with 11 units of labeled paperwork that have been labeled high secret, secret, or confidential.
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