Emails that the Justice Department is set to hand over to Congress will show the FBI warning Biden administration officials that they did not have probable cause to raid President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022, House Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed Tuesday.
Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said he has not had an opportunity to review the emails, but he has heard of their existence.
“It would verify, and I think, confirm much of what we understood,” he said. “We spent a lot of time uncovering just the complete and total weaponization of the Department of Justice under the Biden administration. They used it to go after political enemies, and chief among them was, of course, Donald J. Trump.”
The existence of the emails was first reported by Just the News, which said Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are preparing to turn them over to the Senate and House Judiciary Committees as soon as Tuesday.
According to the report, the documents will show the FBI’s Washington field office said that it “does not believe they established probable cause” to raid Mr. Trump’s Florida home and outline the agency’s concerns that the standard for a search warrant had not been met.
Former special counsel Jack Smith, who led the Biden-era investigations into Mr. Trump, is scheduled to appear under subpoena Wednesday for a closed-door deposition before the House Judiciary Committee.
Mr. Smith was not appointed to his role as special counsel until a few months after the August 2022 raid of Mar-a-Lago.
Earlier that year, the Biden Justice Department received a referral from the National Archives and Records Administration that alleged Mr. Trump improperly removed classified documents from the White House and stored them at Mar-a-Lago.
The Justice Department opened an investigation and obtained a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, which it executed in August 2022.
Mr. Johnson said it is not shocking to Republicans who have investigated the weaponization of the Biden Justice Department that the search warrant may have been obtained without probable cause.
“The evidence, I think and I expect, will verify that,” he said. “There’s going to have to be appropriate accountability. I mean, accountability is equal. It’s important because if you’re going to restore the people’s faith in the justice system, you have to show them that there are serious consequences for people like Jack Smith who abuses that system.”
The Washington Times reached out to the House Judiciary Committee for comment.
