Attorney General Merrick Garland ripped former President Donald Trump Thursday for ginning up outrage over a routine federal authorization that permitted the use of “deadly force” during the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022.
“That allegation is false, and it is extremely dangerous,” Garland, who approved seeking a search warrant for the Palm Beach, Fla., residence, told reporters.
“The document that is being referred to in the allegation is the Justice Department’s standard policy limiting the use of force,” he explained.
“As the FBI advises, it is part of a standard operations plan for searches and, in fact, it was even used in the consensual search of President Biden’s home.”
Trump, 77, emerged from his Manhattan “hush money” criminal trial proceedings on Tuesday and trumpeted the allegation from his Truth Social account.
“WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional [sic] Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!” the former president railed.
The FBI said in a statement the same day that the “use of deadly force” was “standard protocol” for executing all search warrants.
However, Trump ally and far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote in a widely denounced X post that “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”
Trump’s attorneys had first highlighted the authorization in a Tuesday evidence dump in the classified documents criminal case, which they have argued arose from the “unconstitutional” search of Mar-a-Lago.
“On August 8, 2022, armed FBI agents stormed the private residence of a former president of the United States,” wrote lawyers Todd Blanche and Christopher Kise.
“What was unthinkable with respect to President Clinton’s recordings, and deemed unwarranted with respect to Hillary Clinton’s destruction of evidence, was determined to be appropriate by the Biden Administration for President Biden’s chief political rival.”
Special counsel Jack Smith has indicted Trump on 40 counts of illegal retention of “national defense information” among more than 100 classified files, as well as lying to federal authorities who sought them and one of his own attorneys.
The former president has pleaded not guilty to the charges, pointing to the precedent of former President Bill Clinton’s having stashed recordings of wide-ranging conversations — that were potentially presidential records — in his sock drawer.
Under the Presidential Records Act, the National Archives and Records Administration is tasked with retaining all presidential records while letting former presidents retain merely personal ones.
Trump’s legal team has deployed Clinton’s sock drawer defense as proof that presidents are able to determine whether records are personal or official.
Two other co-defendants — Trump valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira — have also pleaded not guilty to conspiring with the former president to shift boxes of classified documents out of the eye of federal authorities and wipe security camera footage.
The indictment is one of four Trump is facing, though US District Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely postponed the trial earlier this month and the case is now not expected to be heard until after the Nov. 5 election.
Biden, 81, evaded criminal charges in February for also retaining classified documents at his home and a former personal office in Washington, DC, though special counsel Robert Hur determined the ex-vice president had “willfully retained and disclosed” the sensitive files to his ghostwriter.
Hur concluded that he could not prove willful retention beyond a reasonable doubt, in part because a jury would view the oldest-ever president “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
